Reese Kaplan -- Parting With The Things of a Lifetime

As many of you know I am planning to relocate overseas to Malaysia later this year.  There's a two-plus week real estate reconnaissance trip scheduled for May at which time the house goes up for sale here and I plan to allocate about 2 final weeks upon my return to clean out whatever else remains in the house.  

I'd mentioned several times about the baseball card collection which was sorted, entered into a database and sold to a generous soul who is a part of this coterie of Mets fans that make this site possible.  That grouping of over 10,000 cards was split into two very large and heavy boxes that got shipped out on Monday.  

What remains in the home of sports-related stuff called to mind a philosophical and economic debate as to what to do with an American lifetime of collecting.  On the wall in my home office is a home plate shaped shadow box containing more than a dozen autographed baseballs ranging from fringe players to Hall of Famers.  

There's a huge 1969 NY Jets photograph in full color autographed by Joe Namath gracing my walls.  Two antique baseball gloves are stored in a shadow box on the wall above the autographed baseballs.  There are additional photographs and other key items that almost finished off the home office decor.  Then there's the huge neon NY Mets sign my wife somewhere found here in El Paso as a birthday gift a few years ago.  

So when faced with these many things I got to thinking about what made me buy and display these many tokens of favorite teams and players.  It also made me realize that this aspect of American life is pretty much going away as baseball and football are not sports that are played in that part of the world.  

The question that arose in my head is whether I should preserve some of these belongings as a remembrance of what my life has been, or should I sell it all and start a fresh life in southeast Asia?  The baseballs in the display case are small enough that it is indeed possible to pack them for shipping in the suitcases-only constraint I've given myself, but most of the rest is too large or otherwise unwieldy to consider incurring the cost of special packaging. 

I kind of faced the same dilemma with a lifetime of art collecting.  This past week I took 58 original art works wrapped in moving blankets by rental van to New Braunfels, TX (about 600 miles away) to drop them at a gallery and auction house to convert them back into some cash.  Driving that distance on a Thursday, staying overnight, then driving that same distance back to El Paso on Friday made me develop a sense of what it must be like for long distance truckers who do this type of mileage on a regular basis.  

A good friend made me realize something that the sacrifice of my Peter Max, Marc Chagall, Itzchak Tarkay, Salvador Dali and other significant works was indeed painful.  However, he said to think of it as a new opportunity to cover my "canvas" of blank new home walls with a fresh collection to highlight this start to a new chapter of my life.  Don't think of it as a loss but as an opportunity.

I therefore think and wonder if I should embrace the dispatching of my sports memorabilia the same way.  Yes, it was significant to me and touched me emotionally to have these many things on display in my homes in New Jersey and Texas, but now I will have a new home in a new country with a new culture.  Perhaps I should welcome the challenge created instead of mourning the loss of the past.