It breaks your heart how many suicides there were at Westbeth in the Seventies in New York. It was the old Bell Telephone Building turned into artists' housing. One day Laurie was getting married in our apartment and Diane Arbus called to ask if she could take some pictures of Elizabeth, my youngest, in the courtyard. I started to tell about the rest of that and it's on a piece of paper somewhere.

Years after we got to California a gallery in San Francisco had an exhibit of photographs by Diane Arbus. I read about it and figured it was the time to go sell the picture of Elizabeth and give her the money because someone had written a sensational bio of Di and the book jacket said they were going to make a movie of it.

So I went to San Francisco with the picture in my grey backpack. I had to curve it and curl it in a little bit to fit but it didn't crack or anything, and I figured whoever bought it could get it straightened out when they put it in an expensive frame. People who buy pictures usually do that.

I think I'll go watch television a little like the children used to. It seems like it's taking a few years to tell about this.

On a date I can't even remember (it has to be 1970 or '71) Diane Arbus called and asked if she could take a roll of pictures of Elizabeth. She had seen her around Westbeth where we all lived in New York and she'd said it would be alright to take her picture. She was wearing her favorite raggedy coat that she had picked up near the incinerator a few weeks before. Her curly hair was getting wild and she looked like a Greek war orphan which in a sense is what we all were at the time. Her father had died when she was six. While Diane Arbus was taking Elizabeth's pictures down in the courtyard Joanne was getting married in the apartment upstairs. The wedding was to last two weeks and was soon annulled.

After the pictures were taken Elizabeth came back upstairs. Later she told me that Diane had asked her to frown while she was taking them.

Diane sent me two proof sheets of the 12 pictures; they were real sad.

While we were still living in Westbeth we found out that Diane had done herself in. There had been a lot of other suicides at Westbeth also. One was a young visitor, mother of two children, who went off the roof and landed in the courtyard with a sound I will never forget, not erased by the subsequent sirens.

There were enlargements of two of the pictures and I knew they were great because Diane had that awful uncanny ability to see the underside of everything, the agony in the ecstasy. I propped them up on a chest of drawers and left them there for eight years. It never occured to me to frame them, I assumed they would last forever, just as they were.

In 1978 we moved to California. I was very sick then. We left most things in the apartment. My middle daughter Emily was living there and she sold the furniture for me. It didn't get much. She sent me some things that remained and in one box were the two pictures of Elizabeth. The proof sheets never turned up again.

The pictures looked kind of beat up and I noticed there was a biography of Diane in Cody's so I thought I should put them away safely so I did, in two large brown envelopes.

In 1987 a gallery in San Francisco was showing an exhibit of photos by Diane so I phoned the director and made an appointment to being in Elizabeth's pictures. I thought that if I could sell them I could give the money to her and that would be wonderful.

Oh--when she took the picture in the courtyard Diane Arbus was already looking at the sad side of life--did you ever see those pictures of hers of the retarded people? They had a bunch of them at the gallery in San Francisco. I took the picture of Elizabeth in on BART thinking I'd sell it from my backpack like my grandmother did shoelaces and my great grandmother through the streets of Minsk, Pinsk, Omsk and Bialystock with her cart shouting "fresh fish."

The morning I went in only one of the two pictures was still in the brown envelope. Mysteries like that happen all the time in my crowded archives.

The gallery owner had made an appointment to see the Diane Arbus picture so we looked at it together at his desk.

He looked at the picture and his eyes filled up with tears so I thought he was going to offer me a thousand dollars or something.

He had no handkerchief and saying that he had not been so moved by a picture in nine years he excused himself to go to the bathroom to get toilet paper as he couldn't seem to stop crying.

When he came back I said, "I can't tell you how shitty it makes me feel selling this picture." Diane Arbus knew that Elizabeth was hurting that year. She felt worldshmerz, which is why she did herself in. Myself lately I feel I have done enough for the world if I even vote.

Then he said that it was a pity so sensitive a portrait of a child's pain could not be purchased by a dealer because the condition of the print was so poor as to preclude anyone being interested in acquiring it. When I asked him what he meant he pointed to some tiny cracks in what was apparently glossy printing paper originally and some chipping around the edges.

This was my ace in the hole for sponsoring Elizabeth going back to graduate school, so my face fell.

So although the dealer was "profoundly moved and touched" by the picture, he didn't offer anything at all.

Then I realized about property and objects of art. Property is that you have to count on that every year it all needs some fixing. An object of art is that if you covered it with glass and put backing behind it you had a much better chance of getting some money for it. Then I figured that as I had let the picture deteriorate along with lots of other stuff from 3,000 miles and a bunch of years away, I should begin to make reparation to Diane for not taking good care of her art.

As I am extremely poor at nailing things I hired a street person to nail the little box I found that said Chateau Diana and I guess had held fruit originally. Hopefully not table grapes which we have to boycott and for me that is a major sacrifice as I dearly love grapes.

I figured I would turn it all into an assemblage and maybe some museum wouldn't notice the condition of the print as it would be seen more dimly inside the little box.

So after that you would think I would have begun taking better care of things.

I try but there's a lot of stuff in the house, mostly archives. I do lots of work and then forget about it.

Inside the slightly crooked box, where the door doesn't hang quite right and the plexiglas window cracked putting it in, is the picture Diane Arbus took of Elizabeth that day in the courtyard at Westbeth. (55 Bank Street, NYC)

We had the pictures registered into the Museum of Modern Art and with Doon Arbus, the person in New York who was authenticating Di's pictures. It was a lot of correspondence.

If you open the door you can see the picture. I hope to someday find the other one if I ever get to thoroughly clean up the work room. By the way, Elizabeth is often happy. As you can see from some other pictures I took of her and put in the assemblage. Diane Arbus only saw one side of life at that time, which is why she got out of it.

One day back in 1964 or 5 or 6 or 7, I got a baby sitter and drove into Manhattan in my red Chevy Vega convertible to see the Andy Warhol show at the Leo Castelli Gallery. It was a real cold day but I kept the top down because I figured I looked a little like Claudette Colbert with my twenties bob bobbing in the wind. The whistles of four lunching construction workers verified this and I had the equivalent of a quick vacation with a free afternoon ahead. At the Castelli Gallery, Ivan Karp who was then Director, suggested that as it was his lunch hour, we sit in the park for a bit and munch chocolate covered vanilla eskimo pies. Ivan had just had his first novel published, titled Doobie Doo, and our conversation ran to serious made up subjects like spaghetti trees and turtles without constituents, carefully avoiding subjects like contemporary art. When we returned in about forty minutes I enjoyed looking at the Warhol exhibit. Ivan, never a man of cliches, gave his sales pitch to several moneyed patrons, saying things like, "The paintings are all twenty percent less on Wednesdays," pretending to be a two pants salesman on Hester Street, enjoying the startled laughs his remarks evoked.

At the time the Leo Castelli Gallery was in the forefront of contemporary art, with Castelli mothering Warhol, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Rosenquist and other glory boys of the new pop art scene. Featured that day, in addition to the great regular stuff, were a bevy of low flying silver helium balloons by Andy Warhol. I forget what they cost but as I was a not wealthy mother of three children, I had never conceived of buying art, just making it and looking at it, as my purchases were confined to things like washer dryers and vacuum cleaners. I was simply one of Ivan's many friends and confidants; he talked of his son Ethan, his writing aspirations, and the "small disturbances of man" to quote Grace Paley. Our interests were the same.

After the wealthy patrons left, each having bought something really expensive, I said I had to go back to my little ones and Ivan generously offered me a Warhol silver helium pillow for free. I was scared that they might dock his pay, but Ivan was in an expansive mood so I grabbed it and tied it to the hood of the Chevy Vega after leaving.

It was a calm cloudless day and I felt festive drving down Fifth Avenue with the Warhol silver pillow securely fastened and billowing behind. Passing Lord and Taylor I noticed six black imitation marble toilets evidently waiting for the sanitation department to pick them up and dispose of them. They looked in OK condition; probably a designer had decided to redecorate. I have always had an eye for ground scorings so I pulled into a towaway spot and asked a surprised and flustered gentleman to help me place one of the sparkling black toilets into my open car. When he hesitated I said it would be a mitvah. He was probably presbyterian or something and didn't know what I meant but he obligingly shoved it into the back seat. I noticed his Brooks Brother's button down shirt getting damp and thanked him fervently with the same God Bless that spare changers would say when you gave them three quarters and a dime.

I left him mopping his brow and drove off with the faux marble black toilet and the Andy Warhol silver pillow, feeling rich. On the way a wind began to blow so I prudently stopped at a legal parking spot, closed the top of the Chevy and made it home OK.

The pillow floated around our living room for a couple of weeks attracting much appreciative attention from our artsy cultured friends and estimates of its value as a "multiple" but still authentic Warhol. Meantime the toilet was installed grandly in our still unfinished intended to be vacation home on Fire Island where it was later swept away in a Northeaster storm (but that is another story).

Meanwhile the pillow continued to be an attraction until the birthday party of one of my daughters when a little girl poked it with a popsicle stick making a tiny hole. After that it became tame and would follow me around like a docile puppy. Evidently it had leaked a little helium but not much and the leakage never accelerated so that for months I pretended I was its master as it followed me around. This astounded the television repair man and all the children in our nursery school carpool and I thought in a way the small defect was adding to its value by making its flotation patterns so responsive to my commands until a minor financial crisis led me to try to sell it. Then it became evident that the small puncture had made it go down in value.

I don't know how long the other Andy Warhol silver pillows lasted and never asked Ivan what they sold for, but this one finally flattened and wouldn't have brought five bucks despite its authenticity. I guess the moral is that if someone is nice enough to give you a real Andy Warhol silver helium pillow you should put it under glass in a deep frame and not use it as a decoration for your child's birthday party unless you are spiritually prepared to let it go down in value as most of my worldly possessions have. Amen.

One day in 1972 when we still lived at Westbeth, the artist's housing project at 463 West Street in New York, Barton Benes, one of my three favorite artists in the building, brought me a Chanukah gift, an ashtray made out of the ashes of Hans Schneider, a former SS storm trooper. Barton had been sent a container with Hans Schneider's ashes by mistake. It was addressed to his niece in America who evidently lived at 466 West Street. It bore his name , rank and dates, and was addressed to his surviving niece. Barton was Jewish and his middle name was Lidice in memory of the small Czechoslovakian town where the entire population had been massacred by the Nazis during World War II. When he opened the container and saw the name and title, he realized that the good Lord, either in his wisdom or his confusion, had given Barton an opportunity to take some small revenge.

He therefore hot footed it to the nearest five and dime store where he bought three standard conventional ashtrays, the kind with the little depressions on which to rest one's unlit cigarette or joint.

Barton, a satirical sculptor if there ever was one, then covered all surfaces with his secret sculpture glue and dipped each of the three in Hans Schneider's ashes, making sure that every bit was coated, both top and undersides. The greyish white of Nazi ashes made oddly attractive ashtrays, although to a person who did not know the source of the coating, they might have been perceived as unremarkable (a term I have learned from my limited experience reading autopsies and other medical histories).

As Barton is a great artist and lots of his work is much more flashy (like his toothbrush with real teeth imbedded in it) I wasn't too thrilled with his gift at the time, indeed was a bit scared and avoided using it and even slid a piece of paper under it when it needed dusting, being skittish about touching .

Years passed, as they always seem to when I'm not looking, and I found myself living in Berkeley, California. Lots of the things that had been in the Westbeth apartment were gone, including most of my best watercolors which had burned in a flash fire when the people who sublet the apartment one summer, had split, taking our last light bulb and leaving only an unfortunate candle which we lit, having returned, tired and happy, at midnight. Note: funny how all one's best work gets better and better in memory as the years pass. Still, sixty three watercolors was a great loss, the only bright spot being that the fire chased away or killed the NewYork cockroaches.

Anyhow as any art piece by Barton was bound to have some financial value, I accepted his gift graciously and actually took good care of it through the years, placing it high up to be safe from breaking and only hiding it and covering it with a clean towel when a new friend noticed it and seemed so excited about its history that I was afraid he might appropriate it one day when my back was turned.

Anyhow after I'd explained why it was not exactly an ordinary ashtray, my friend's girlfriend said I should call the Believe it or not Ripley Museum in San Francisco and see if they were interested in buying it. I hated the idea of selling anything that Barton had given me, but as the suggestion coincided with a large dental bill and an extra charge for late payment on my most recent Gold Visa American Express card with which I, like most Americans, pick my way through this century, it sounded like a great idea. They seemed interested and told me they'd pass the information along to the Central Office. Two days later I got a call from their purchasing agent. "We're very interested," he said. " We need a photo and documentation." When I hung up I was excited and immediately put a roll of film in the camera and took two shots of the ashtray, and one of our orange cat, Tim Leary.

The pictures turned out OK, not great, though the one of the cat was terrific. I telephoned Barton who had just had a major exhibit in Russia of art pieces he had made with his HIV positive blood. As always he was dear and understanding and said he understood that it was only financial need that made me have to unwillingly offer his gift for sale. When he emailed me documentation for the ashtray, I learned that of the three he had made, he had kept one, sold the second to Larry Hagman, star of the TV show Dallas, for an undeclared large sum, and kept the third for himself. He also mentioned that the Harry Abrams publishing company was putting out a book of his artwork , so to photograph any of the other work he'd given to me. Doing a careful inventory, I came up with the following:

One oil on stretched canvas 14 by 12 depicting a large group of uncircumcized penises, in a field next to a barn silo with a small windmill.

One pen and charcoal 22 by 14 under glass featuring a large group of mostly circumsized penises each with a telephone number and address inscribed on it. (This reminded me that when I had hung it on the wall at Westbeth when he lived there, one of the people represented had hotly denied the connection.)

The third piece was a book that Barton had glued closed with a crosscut of the kind one usually makes on a baked potato, showing a tantalizing fragment of its contents.

I asked Barton for a suggested price to ask. He answered typically that he hadn't the faintest idea so I figured I'd shoot for the moon, an amount that an economical person like myself could retire on along with Social Security, so sent in the documentation asking forty thousand.

I looked up Barton on the Internet and though the computer crashed three times because of a little squabble about the bill, I found that Barton was already famous and was included in the permanent collection of many museums.

Armed with this arty information ,I snail mailed the research results, the photos and the casual request for forty thousand to Believe It or Not Ripley and waited for the jackpot .

Five days later a short note arrived instead, with the returned pictures and documentation from Barton. It stated that they had thought it was a World War II memento, and they were not interested in contemporary art. The disappointment was extreme, especially as Hans Schneider's ashes were hardly contemporary, but as I am a pragmatic as well as economical person, I modestly reduced the price from forty thousand to four hundred, hoping to at least score enough to get rid of the final payment on my latest root canal work.. Unfortunately (is that an adjective or an adverb- I forget?) they were not interested at any price.

I was crestfallen (definitely an adjective) but knowing that Barton's piece was a work of art , I wrote a description of it and put it on Ebay at forty thousand. After a week when there were no takers, I wrote a more glowing description and raised the price to forty one thousand. One timid response offered to exchange it for eight cartons of Camels and a World War II automatic pistol, and another offered to swap it for a necklace made of the shinbone of a KGB secret spy, but I figured if I just held on to it, it would go up like California real estate.

Real estate goes up slowly so I decided to accelerate the process by writing to known philanthropists who might want to purchase it and donate it to the Judah Magnes Museum. Not being acquainted with any known philanthropists, I thought the sensible thing might be to write about it. I had read in Publisher's Weekly, a magazine subscribed to by Mark, my long time live-in lover, that publishers were now offering enormous advances for books about quirky objects, so I wrote a synopsis and brief proposal and sent it to thirty major publishers, getting the names of editors from Literary Market place and changing the name on my form letter as everybody does these days of Microsoft Word and Simple Text. Myself I read mostly what comes in the mail in handwriting or looks typed on a beat up Olympia. So far I have received enthusiastic responses from five publishers, astonishing, since my previous literary attempts were always returned with the terse comment, "We do not read unsolicited manuscripts." So I am vastly encouraged and expect that this method may help me to redeem my previous failure at maintaining the value of valuable objects that have been in my possession in the past, including myself.

Years later, after Ivan had remarried and had little time for eskimo pies and fun nonsense dialogues, I met him in an elevator going up to the Robert Miller Gallery. The gallery was having an exhibit of Joseph Cornells and he had several he was going to sell to the gallery owner.

"I'll sell you a small collage or four hundred dollars, if you'll buy it before the elevator reaches the gallery floor," he said in his inimitable witty style, pulling out a not great collage of an art nouveau angel and another object I can't remember.

"Done," I said, just as we reached the floor.

As he was always totally honest I knew it was a lesser Cornell but authentic. Poor Joseph Cornell lived with his mother in Queens and had done his great art in her basement all his life. I'd known a lady named Rhett who lived in Great Neck and collected good Cornells but I'd never thought I'd be able to own one, so I was overjoyed.

It was the first art object I'd ever bought and I was scared to tell my parents especially because later when they saw it they thought it was mine and said my work before had been much better, I must have been tired when I did it.

It was already framed by Mr. Cornell himself and I hung it on the wall and grew to love it though it was not as subtle or haunting as his boxes.

"Time passes slowly here in Scaryland," Ivan wrote me in one of his whimsical kind notes after my husband died in 1967 . I didn't see him then for a very long time. The little Cornell was still with the kids and me when we moved to Westbeth in 1970. It occupied the honor place on our wall and I proudly pointed it out to visitors.

I took it down in 1978 when I moved to California with my boyfriend Mark. The children were grown- the younger one already in college in California, and I was really sick and intended to say goodbye to her. I owed St Vincent's hospital ten thousand bucks so I got a little stamp that said "deceased-return to sender" and my sister stamped all the bills that came to the apartment we had sublet, until the hospital finally gave up. We had paid extra for forty two big cardboard cartons at the airport but I carried the little Cornell with us on the plane when we moved.

I hung it on the motel wall the first few nights and on the living room wall when we moved to a new place in Berkeley. It stayed on the wall through some money troubles and seemed to grow better every time I looked at it, like a carefully tended marijuana plant.

Sometime in 1979 when I checked it while worrying about an especially unfortunate telephone bill , it seemed to say,( sadly,) if you can imagine a painting being sad, "Sell me."

I had no more thought of selling a painting as buying one, but realized my inner adult was probably talking to my outer child and decided to write Ivan to see if he knew anyone who wanted to buy it.

Ivan said, "Yes, me," and after he received the little collage sent by UPS two day air insured, sent me three thousand dollars.

What I learned from this was: keep everything but your children and yourself under glass and hung on a wall if you want it to go up in value.

I have a proven track record of working hard and then not attending to some small housewifely detail so it's all in vain. Maybe my self destructive side was activated by the full four year orthodox Freudian analysis I had in exchange for all my best paintings, but when it comes to preserving what needs to be preserved properly, during my previous life, my eyes would glaze over and my mind stroll off to hummable tunes.

Now I kick myself for not having saved all of Jimmy's amazing letters and have only the very last, with even its end page missing, replaced by a zerox (at least by then I realized that Jimmy was going to become Black History)

I'd first met Jimmy the last year he went to De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx. He and my husband Bradley and Charles Simmons who later became Assistant Editor of the Sunday Book Review at the New York Times, worked on the school magazine The Magpie. When we were going to college and living over the fish store at 34th and 2nd Avenue we started a new magazine with Jimmy to be called This Generation.. We made a dummy and raised seventeen dollars towards production. That wasn't even enough for a mimeograph machine so the magzine died, but we all stayed alive and Jimmy went on to be famous. At the time he was broke, working part time in a restaurant and staying over on Thursdays, sleeping in our frayed sleeping bag .

After he kind of gave up on the USA, and went to live, first outside of Paris and then in Corsica for a while, he wrote a bunch of letters. One of them, when he was writing Giovanni's Room, was about how he had decided to write a book in which the characters weren't black and being black was not an issue at all. He agonized over that one because part of him- the part that had been a child preacher, knew he was marked by destiny to be a black spokesman,

At any rate time passed , Jimmy wrote a bunch of books, several of them great, and the letters lessened. I still loved his first book best. At the time we were all going through "starvation days" as writer Elliott Baker later put it, he had been working on it, a book he then was calling "Crying Holy" though the title was later changed to "Go Tell It On The Mountain".

I started thinking l should save Jimmy's letters, not only because he was getting famous but also because some of what he wrote was so special. Later l would sometimes see fragments in the writing that had begun in the letters. That was exciting but at the time I was not yet aware that some things are more worth saving and taking care of than others. For example, I dutifully saved empty mayonaise jars and the little tinfoil containers frozen food came in. It was before microwaves so I heaved out plastic stuff and Jimmy's letters after reading them, with the same reckless disregard for value.

When Bradley died in l967 Jimmy wrote me a three page letter, His letters were always beautiful to look at , his large cursive seriously down- slanting handwriting that was always such a shock because of his open smile and seeming optimism.

When I moved to Westbeth in New York with my children, I still had the letter. It was then in an album made up of condolence letters. That was where it got the rubber cement spots from where I'd pasted it in. I kept that book through all the moves that followed and have it now. It survived some chaotic packing and landed in Berkeley, California about the same time that we did , eleven years after Brad's death and eight years before Jimmy's.

UPS had done their job, but mysteriously, the third page had vanished while it followed my Grapes of Wrath entrance into California. I was with Mark who I'd met in l973, and had come out to say goodbye to my youngest, Lizzie who was starting college. I'd been very sick , still owed St Vincents hospital ten thousand bucks, and thought I was going to die. Obviously I didn't die, indeed got rather healthy despite my continuing East Coast suspicion of health food and spiritualism of any kind. One day I checked the album again and was pleased that at least I had made a zerox of Jimmy's letter. It was in a folder in the back so I put the third page next to the second page of the real letter. Unfortunately the rubber cement bottle tipped over but only the zerox was ruined. So I made a zerox of the zerox and glued it in.

Years later, after Jimmy had died ( thus making everything about him more valuable, he would have said sarcastically,) I tried to sell it to the Schomburg Library for African American Culture and they were real enthusiasric until they found out that the last page was a zerox and there were a few little rubber cement clumps here and there. Which made me remember how I'd been fired from my first job ,( drawing undergarments for a magazine called The Lingerie Review,) for getting rubber cement on the boss's pants. It seems he'd sat on a chair I'd failed to clean up after a similar rubber cement spill. .

Age has made me conscious that if I'd taken better care of stuff, including myself -( like maybe used moisturizer) - things might be different today. However as I am presently blessed with other joys, I shall not rue the letters lost, the silver uncounted, the manscripts left to mildew. These events having taught me a lesson, I resolved to take better care of valuable things and have not only framed Jimmy's letter, perhaps a little too late for a profitable sale of his heartfelt true words, but not too late to let him know in Heaven- where he is probably teaching God some ringing gospel lyrics, - that I always loved his slightly old fashioned twangy essay style. By the way, why haven't they given him the Nobel Prize for literature?. That way I bet Stanford or some museum would have bought Jimmy's letter, even with the zeroxed third page.

When my mom died at age ninety-eight, my sister, at whose home she had been living. offered me a choice of mom's sterling silver serving fork, spoon and cake knife, my father's diamond tie stick pin and his silver watch. I took the fork, spoon and cake knife and accidentally the stickpin and watch also.

When my sister found out she went ballistic so I FedExed the watch back to her, gave the serving fork, spoon and cakeknife to my daughters, and lost the stickpin about a week later while smoking pot.

Ridden with guilt, I went for comfort to my top dresser drawer where I had stashed the fifty-nine Wedding Anniversary cards my father had sent to my mom during their fifty-nine years of marriage.

Nobody else in the family had wanted them but me, as I am a born packrat and accumulate things nobody else wants at a regular and unfortunately accelerating rate. I had always been deeply touched by the sentiments in my father's annual cards to my mother as around the Hallmarkian cornball poem there was always another poem on the back. It wasn't until I was older (and never had the heart to tell my mom) that these poems, sans quotation marks, were not exactly by Daddy, but by people like Keats and Shelley, William Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, Edmund Spenser and John Donne. When my dad would write, in his beautiful, flowing script "that's my last duchess on the wall" etc. she never knew it was Robert Browning who had written it, not Daddy.

Though the cards were funky, almost slushy, together they radiated love, like the twin sweatshirts my dutiful but often angry sister had given them that said" Dotty loves Al and Al loves Dotty."

Once before I had been offered a choice from among our scant family treasures. Mom said one of us could have her diamond engagement ring and ther other all the leftover wedding rings of everyone who had died. My sister had chosen the engagement ring which Mom always kept in what she called the vault. Nobody in our family ever wore anything valuable except at the time they got it. They always kept it in a vault. Sometimes the key would get lost and it always cost forty dollars to replace, never going up, like everything else, by inflation. I keep only copyrights in a vault. I have a hundred and eighty-two of them in there plus everybody's birth certificates and twenty bucks in case I am ever really desperate.

Well, what I chose were the family wedding rings which my mom seemed to have collected like I collect copyrights. None of them were more valuable than forty dollars, about the price of a lost safety deposit box key.

There was Mom's, her mom's (Grandma Anna), sister Bea's who died when mom was ninety and sister Billie (Belle) who died when mom was ninety seven, I added my own which was skinny but real gold and cost about nineteen dollars on Canal Street when I was nineteen .

Okay I took all Daddy's anniversary cards and the rings and did the following:

Wait. Let me detour for a minute.

In December of 2000, my boyfriend Mark with whom I have lived happily these twenty-six years, bought a bunch of wooden-type holders from a lady who runs a plant lending service called the Rainforest, for about ten dollars each and put them up for sale on Ebay for two hundred each. Before he did, I asked him to give me one because it had sixty-four little wooden partitions, just enough for Daddy's fifty-nine wedding anniversary cards and Mom's and Grandma's and Aunt Bea's and Aunt Billie's and my old wedding ring.

I offered to pay Mark partly out of my household allowance but he refused, so I put the pretty oak case against the wall and filled it up with my nostalgia knicknacks. It looked a little cuckoo, like an old Walter Evans photo of a trailer trash family who papered their walls with faded Jesuses from hotel Gideon bibles or something. But the power of the uncredited major poets and the fact that the wedding rings had been worn for all those years, began to give it an aura that rose like smoke.

Well, I guess I should ask forty-thousand for it like I was going to ask the Ripley's Believe It Or Not museum for the ashtray made out of human ashes. Maybe more since it kind of showed the life and true love of good people, which a Nazi like Hans Schneider never could become. Or maybe, since Daddy and Mom were Jewish and Grandma Anna and Aunt Bea and Aunt Billie were too and I am, I should ask the Judah Magnes museum in Berkeley, or the Jewish museum in San Francisco or New York for the forty-thou.

Only I know I'll never be able to sell it and I pity my poor children and Mark because when I go "upstairs", hopefully, like my Mom said she'd be going when she was havimg big trouble breathing,, they'll have to deal with it.

The thing is, I've learned that to make something increase in value you don't have to necessarily sell it, only make it, and/or take good care of it.