This item made the cut. That is, I am keeping it. It was headed for the Fling Pile. I don’t frequently use a kitchen scale. I used to have a little postage scale but nowadays, if I’m unsure about how much postage I need, I just hop over to the post office and the uscan weighs the item for me. But something stopped me. I thought, “I’ll just look this thing up on eBay.”

I didn’t think it was worth any kind of real money (and of course it wasn’t, $50 was about the upper limit, $15-$25 was typical). I was more curious about whether it qualified as a “collectible”. I would say that it does. There were all kinds of “American Family Scales” out there in all colors and with various accessories. Instead of going in the Fling Pile, it made its way into the Landfill Chitchen, where it got cleaned up and now proudly occupies a space on my display shelf.

eBay can be a bit scary. For a split second, I coveted some of those old scales. If I had the right kind of space, I could collect them. The GG will be happy to know that I kept that impulse in check and we will only be owning this one white scale. I have done a *minor* bit of collecting on eBay, like a few red Bakelite utensils and some old Sunset cookbooks and Great Lakes Red Books when I can find them (they are rare albeit inexpensive, at least in the era I am primarily interested in).

Flinging is such a balance. I am terrified of hoarding. There have been hoarders in literally both sides of my family and also the GG’s. Hoarders are not not not not bad people, by definition anyway, if you are a serial killer and are hoarding bodies [eek], that’s a whole ‘nother thing. I also think hoarding living aminals (cats, etc.) is not a good thing. Other than those conditions, I am not even sure I would agree that hoarding is a disorder. Alas, I think that hoarders are largely at the end of a continuum. I do know that hoarders cause a lot of problems for those who have to live with them or clean up after them*. I did not get whatever collection of DNA might express itself via hoarding but, living in the same house for [gulp] 30 years after starting out with basically nothing except a small automotive vee-hickle, a sewing musheen and a flute, I’ve collected a few things. And then I inherited my parents’ stuff. And sometimes the grandchildren (or your spouse) *want* some of that stuff, even though none of it has any significant monetary value.

You don’t always know what someone else finds sentimentally valuable. Sometimes I find that I have flung something I didn’t think was valuable only to find out that one of the Beach Urchins (or the GG) was attached to that item. And then there are things that *I* remember from my early childhood that I thought were really cool, like some fancily painted wooden “hamburger shaping” devices that lived up in the top cupboards at our shabby old house on Superior Street. I loved them dearly, I bet The Comm decided at some point that she couldn’t be bothered about using them and didn’t want to *move* them (to Dillon Street) and flung them. I would love to have those now but I understand.

*By the way, The Commander was NOT a hoarder!

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