What do we value?

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor A while back, I was sitting with my wife and her parents around their kitchen table playing cards. During a break in the action, my wife was scrolling through Facebook when she saw a post she thought was worth mentioning.

A social media friend of hers had posted that he was dividing up some land he owned near where my in-laws live and was advertising it on Facebook. It was relevant because my wife’s folks are in the process of buying up land adjacent to the 40-acre homestead there in Lee County where they live. The guy on Facebook was asking way more per acre than they had been paying or planning on paying for what looked like a similar type of acreage, namely pasture land or farmable fields.

You see, for the past 30 years or so, the members of my wife’s family who live out there, namely her parents, grandparents, her sister and her husband, her aunt and uncle, and a cousin, have been improving the land out there, adding to it as land became available and basically building what I guess would qualify as an estate.

And while I get it, I sort of don’t get it. None of them farm. They hunt and fish, but not on the land they own. But they all see the value in owning that land. As my wife put it, to them, owning that land and having it in the family signifies a tangible thing they can hold onto and have an pass down to the next generation.

Like I said, I get it, but I kind of don’t. It’s 40 acres or so, so it’s not like we’re talking about the Ponderosa or whatever the people on “Yellowstone” call their land. They lease out most of it to local farmers and yes, that does produce some revenue but it also comes with a property tax bill and I don’t think it’s a very lucrative deal. But it’s their money and their land and they value it.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Different people value different things. For them, it’s land. For others, it’s stocks and bonds. For some, it’s a collection of things, like stamps, old records, baseball cards, fine china, classic cars or vintage elephant lamps (or whatever).

We can measure wealth in a number of ways. Of course, “in dollars” is the easiest way to compare the value of something. I have a comic book that the internet tells me is worth about $5,000 in mint condition. I’m not sure it’s in mint condition. It costs about $100 to have a comic book graded and sealed in an official collector’s sleeve by the CBCS (Comic Book Collectables Service, in case you didn’t know such a thing exists). And as much as I value that comic and can appreciate it’s value, I’m not paying money to have someone tell me it’s valuable and then just stick it back in the filing cabinet where I store my old comic books. I’m not interested in selling it, and like my in-laws, the value I hold is in owning it, not seeing how much I can get for it. Maybe I will pass down my comic book collection to my children or my grandchildren. Maybe they’ll want it. Maybe they won’t.

Like I said before, I don’t get it, but I kind of do. But it’s not always about the “in dollars” value of something. I also have a pretty big collection of “Star Wars” toys. The old ones from the 1970s and 1980s have pretty big collector value, assuming they are fairly well preserved. I can assure you mine are not fairly well preserved because well, I played with them.

I blew them up, buried them in the dirt, switched their heads around, painted them and generally wore them out. Like my comic books, they are not in mint condition.

Why? Because they weren’t collectables to me. They were a source of fun and entertainment and escapism and creativity. That’s a value that I held and still hold that has no “in dollars” value. You can’t put a price tag on that kind of value, just like no one wants my old cassette tapes, but I’ve still got them in a big plastic storage tub. I played them, rewound them and played them some more, over and over. I didn’t switch to CDs until very late in the game.

Nobody cares that I have Guns N’ Roses’ “Appetite for Destruction” on cassette. I don’t even think we own a cassette player anymore! But I can hold that little plastic case in my hands and remember distinctly many events from my teenage years.

Value doesn’t even have to be something tangible. Like those memories or like a friendship that might have faded away over the years that can be rekindled with just a phone call (or text, maybe. Do people still make phone calls?) Value is where you find it.

What do you value?