It was snowing Monday. Not the kind of snow that really stacks up on the window sill either. More like the kind that whips through the air, riding the wind like a frozen stampede of flakes and ice. My body was not prepared for such a thing.

You see, last week I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and getting in a little long-overdue trout fishing in Little River. This week I went outside to discover a winter wonderland, complete with gale force winds and sub-freezing temperatures.

I told a friend of mine last week that warm days are much better suited to the winter than the summer. A day like last Thursday, for instance, could never be appreciated in June as much as it was in January. Having it in June would be nice, but in January, it was priceless. I think it really says something about the way we are as human beings that we appreciate small quantities of anything much more than we do large quantities.

Think about it.

The fewer there are of something, the more it becomes worth. Baseball cards, comic books, gemstones, precious metals, meteorites, exotic animals, collectible stamps and coins and even artwork by masters are all examples.

If a person can say, "I have the only one of those ever made," or, "Only 28 of these were ever made and I have number 6;" then suddenly the item takes on a value all its own.

I recall hearing the story of that misprinted stamp with the upside down airplane printed on it. The fellow who had the older one got wind of another one having been found (without a date stamp, of course). He promptly bought the other fellow's stamp for about $250,000 and then burned it in front of a live audience. Insane? Perhaps. But he managed to make the other one go from very valuable to 'priceless,' which was his goal all along.

I think I could find a better way to make my mark in the world than to be known as "the guy with the stamp" or "the fellow that found the coin." What kind of an achievement is that? Owning something doesn't make the owner special, in my opinion. Sometimes I don't even see the appeal. Take that stamp as an example. You can't touch it, it isn't attractive (after all, it is a mistake) and you dare not let anyone get too close to it for fear they might damage it or steal it. So what good is it?

As for my take on the whole thing, I think that the fellow missed the mark. Specifically, I don't think value can be found in such a place. True value lurks deeper than prices and market studies.

Recently, my brother-in-law decided to make his fortune in racing cards. He acquired some cards off some lady's dead husband's estate. With names like Davy Allison, Alan Kulwiki and Dale Earnhardt, I figured the cards were worth a pretty penny. So I offered to help him find some of them on the Internet. Despite what we thought about those cards, I found that many of them were only worth 30 or 40 cents, even though really good drivers were printed upon them. The catch wasn't who was on the card, although that was part of it.

The true value was based on what company made the card, how many were made and how many are left. Since these were printed in the early 1990s, there must be a bunch of them around. We did find one card that he was selling - a metal card from Gant Oil Company depicting Bill Elliot that was worth more than $50. Nonetheless, he apparently turned a tidy profit on the whole thing.

The whole experience left me considering pulling out my old comic books and seeing what I could get out of them on the Internet. I have about 1,000 left from when I was in grade school. Some have cover prices going back to five cents. You would think that those would have a pretty extreme value, considering their age. However, it may turn out to be just like the cards. It doesn't matter. It will be fun just to get them all out and look at them, just to see what I have and remember being a child and reading them for the first time. They're just lying in the attic, collecting dust along with the other attic stuff I have up there. All the things I managed to box away and hide before it was thrown away by some errant hand. I am sure that I will find a few select old toys, old clothes, old games, broken things and old photos - the sundry trappings of a lifetime of memories. Maybe it is all worthless in the real world, but by now they have taken on a value all their own.

Get more tongue in cheek commentary this week's issue of the Alleghany News!

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