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Read the sixth article about possessions

Antiques Road Show

Art/Don Nelson

It was Oscar Wilde who defined a cynic as a person "who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."

It's a shame Oscar died about a hundred years too soon to watch Antiques Road Show on PBS. I'd like to bring him back from the dead and sit him down in front of my television set some Monday night at 8. I wonder what the witty old subversive would make of it -- I mean, once he got over the surprise of seeing people moving around inside a 19-inch magic fish bowl. I bet he'd laugh.

Antiques Road Show is where people find out what their treasured possessions are "worth," which is to say, what an expert thinks the item would bring at auction. The show's producers rent a convention hall (each week it's a different city), seat appraisers from Christies, Sotheby's and other famous auction houses at tables, and invite everyone in town to bring in their attic finds. Hundreds of people show up and stand in line for hours to have an expert scrutinize their vase, ring, war medal, grandfather clock, sword, tankard, letter signed "Lincoln" -- you name it. Admission is free, as are the appraisals, which probably explains the crowds.

Being a mean-spirited philistine, I tune in hoping to see the look on the face of the owner of a Chinese vase who discovers it isn't Ming after all ("Sorry. J.C. Penney, 1965, I'd estimate. Next."). But the producers aren't as cruel as me. Each hour-long episode features on-camera appraisals (the show is taped) of only about a dozen of the more interesting items, and these one-on-ones almost always deliver welcome news. A Tiffany-style lamp is genuine Tiffany and would probably go for $100,000 at auction. A collection of baseball cards from the early 20th century would ordinarily bring $30,000 to $40,000, but the owner Elmer's glued them into this nifty wooden frame he built in 1971 when he was 12. Now the glue is leaching through the cardboard. Pity. Still, the collection is worth a few grand.

When people get good news on Antiques Road Show, it isn't like winning the Showcase Showdown on The Price is Right. There's no kissing the host or clasping one's skull in disbelief. But you can imagine what's going through the mind of, say, the owner of a nondescript brown ceramic pot after she learns that her yard-sale find is the work of a much-sought-after Native American artist. The appraiser estimates it would sell at auction for around the sticker price of sports utility vehicle. Poor woman, she's been using it all these years as an umbrella stand. Now she's got problem: Where am I going to put this thing to keep it safe?

And therein lies one of the my favorite absurdities about possessions and their so-called "worth." Without changing one molecule, a receptacle for soggy umbrellas can become a person's pride and joy. Well, maybe not joy, but definitely cause for adding a rider on one's homeowner's insurance. And what is source of this transformation? Nothing more tangible than another person's guess as to what someone else might pay for it.

When did we become so appraisal-crazy about possessions? When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of Cleveland, I used to collect baseball and football cards. Like every other kid I knew, I didn't care squat about getting a Reggie Jackson or a Dick Butkis or the some other player -- star or otherwise -- on some other city's team. They were the enemy. Their cards were for clothespinning to the fork of my bike to make it sound like a motorcycle.

Happiness was getting a Max Alvis or Jack Brohammer, a John Garlington or Mike Howell or any other now-forgotten player from that era's feeble Indians or blessed Browns. If a price guide existed somewhere that would have informed me that these guys' cards weren't worth a penny, I didn't know about it. And I wouldn't have cared.

Check that. I might have cared if any market had existed for my sports cards beyond the cash register at Fitch Drug, where I bought them. But there wasn't.

Of course, now there is. Collecting sports cards has been a big business for nearly a generation. I remember a few years ago when my son Scott, about 12 at the time, was consumed by sports cards. Virtually every cent he earned and every birthday or holiday gift wish he made involved cards, mostly basketball. Each month he would eagerly await the arrival of Sports Cards magazine, a price guide to which he subscribed.

One day he came downstairs waving the magazine triumphantly. "Remember my Jordan gold signature?" he asked. "It's up to $120."

He was talking about a basketball card showing Michael Jordan playing golf. In the lunatic world of sports card collecting, this was one of the cards issued for the Bulls' star during his first retirement. There were two versions -- one with M.J.'s signature printed in silver, the other with a gold signature. Gold signature card were inserted at a rate of only one per 180 packs. To his delight, Scott had beaten the odds.

I should mention that living in Ohio, as we were at the time, and perhaps taking his cue on rooting allegiances from his father, Scott was no fan of the Bulls. He didn't dream of being like Mike, didn't even play basketball all that often. Yet this little cardboard picture of Michael Jordan playing an iron from the rough became one of his most prized possessions.

I tell this story not to punctuate some Reaganesque lament over the demise of sports-card-collecting innocence. If I'd grown up in my son's era, I might have been as mercenary about it as he. But Scott and his sports cards were like the woman with her brown pot on Antiques Road Show. They both prized their possessions so much because someone else had convinced them the items were seriously cashable.

That's strange, but this is stranger: Most of that so-called "worth" is make-believe.

You think that woman with the pot is ever going to put it up for auction? If she were an art dealer, sure. Or maybe if she needed money for a lung transplant.

A more likely scenario: The pot is given an honored position in her living room and spends the rest of its owners' life sitting by a china cabinet being valuable.

As opposed to its pre-Antiques Road Show destiny, which was to sit by the front door not being valuable.

When Scott would tell me how much his price guide said one of his cards was worth, I always had the same response: "It's not worth anything if you don't you sell it." I wanted him to understand that valuation is only theory, make-believe, until you say, "This is the price I want for this" and take the money coming at you from an outstretched hand.

Why are we so reluctant to do that with a "valuable" possessions? Fear of regret is my guess. We're afraid we'll miss it or that we could have gotten more for it if we'd held onto it longer. It's the rare collector who doesn't think what's worth something today will be worth more tomorrow.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, I'll sell ya tomorrow. And then, one day, our valuables are really, really valuable. And we're really, really dead. I imagine that whoever first advised, "Live each day like you think it's going to be your last because one day you'll be right" wouldn't have owned a lot of Beanie Babies.

In his autobiographical essay "Flip Cards," writer and English professor Robert Pope recalls how he'd flip baseball cards with the other kids in his neighborhood. In this game, you try to toss a card onto another player's card lying on the ground and win them both. (No one tosses around sports cards anymore for fear of damaging them; mostly they're kept in polyethylene sleeves). Once exposed to the game, Pope practiced for hours and got really good at it.

One day he comes home with a huge haul. But his mother is furious with him for taking advantage of the other kids and orders him to give them back to their rightful owners. Pope has no idea which cards belong to whom. Besides, he thinks, I won them fair and square. So he decides to hide them away.

I like the epilogue of this story because Pope reveals that years later he dug out the cards, which had appreciated greatly, and sold them. The proceeds largely paid his way through graduate school.

Now there's someone who put his possessions to work for him instead of becoming their lifetime caretaker. He knew the price of the cards. He understood their potential value to him. He exchanged one thing he valued for something he valued more: education.

Oscar Wilde obviously wasn't talking admiringly of cynics when he said they knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. But I admire anyone who thinks clearly about prices and value, about what one wants from life and the means at one's disposal. This is the person who will risk possible regret and exchange a known good for a potentially greater one. That's no cynic. That's a philosopher.

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