Lost Treasures

Many years ago I came home from college for a holiday or summer vacation — I don’t remember which — and discovered that my energetic mother, during one of her frequent episodes of extravagant house cleaning, had disposed entirely of my collection of baseball cards. Kids stuff, she must have thought. Clutter. Not something a college man should continue to care about.

This was not just any collection of a child or casual collector, but one painstakingly organized by league, team and “star quality,” in such pristine condition you could still smell the bubble gum that came with the purchase of each packet of cards. The complete 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers team  — World Series Champions (beat the damn Yankees in seven games) — was encased in protective plastic.

It is hard to place a dollar figure on the value of that collection today, but it probably would represent the greatest portion of my retirement portfolio.  It would be like holding 1000 shares of the first Apple stock ever issued.  Thrown in the trash.

Far less valuable and traumatic are the books that have been removed from my houses over the years to make room for newer books, family photographs and yarn for my wife’s weaving projects. There were no signed first editions discarded, so the value was nothing like the loss of my rookie cards of Duke Snyder or Roy Campanella or Jackie Robinson. . .even now, I get weak in the knees just thinking about this.

While a mint-condition complete set of the 1957 World Series winning Milwaukee Braves baseball cards has much more value now than a complete set of John Grisham novels, I still miss the satisfaction of being able to stare at the full body of that author’s work.  Rather than rejoice in what I still have, I tend to focus on the holes in my collections of  Hemingway and Fitzgerald.  I weep over my losses from lending Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides, Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible and Simon Mawer’s Prague Spring.  Wanting to share these authors with others, I lost forever my own annotated copies of their masterpieces.

I once had a colleague who was a collector of all kinds of books. He built a new house around his eclectic collection: a wall-to-wall and floor-to-vaulted ceiling display.  To access the far reaches of his collection, he used a 20-foot ladder mounted on tracks. It was the showpiece of his country home.

At the time of his death, author Pat Conroy owned 8,000 books and not a single Kindle.  He said he wanted to feel and smell what he was reading. Conroy wrote about a friend of his who had a lovely mountain home in North Carolina “made holy by well selected books.”

I know it would make practical sense to keep donating my used books to my former employer, our local public library, a local church and a struggling commercial bookstore. But it’s an emotional battle for me. I like to look back at what I’ve read to see notes I made in the margins and words I underscored in an earlier reading, and to think about why that was important to me. I like to re-read passages and re-think what the author was trying to accomplish.

Fearing lost treasures, the redistribution of books will be the toughest part of downsizing during the downslope of my life.

JER