There is apparently a collector for everything. Someone in the world collects used band-aids. Why I have no idea as the idea seems almost as revolting as a collection of belly button lint but according to a website devoted to weird things people collect, there are people out there who collect belly button lint, including a self-taught clothing designer named Skippy who uses it as part of his appeal for a date or least a woman who will kiss him, any woman. He’s 34 and still working on it. Has no one had the courage to tell him it’s not working? Given the offer of roses and chocolate or belly button lint, the choice would be pretty obvious to women, but guess he has to find out the truth for himself though he seems to have a lot of followers who are advising him.

I don’t know whether to question how anyone gathers enough of a bizarre exterior body shedding to start a collection or just move on to collections of something that makes more sense, like collecting vintage Pez dispensers or miniature chairs built for dolls. There’s a woman in Belgium who has amassed a collection of 57,000 lithograph stamped tin containers, the kind that cookies came in before we turned into a rabid paper and plastic wrap devouring throwaway society. That woman at least created a museum for the oval, rectangular and circular works meant to attract the buyer who could use them post-gorging to hold Crayons, spools of thread or old love letters. You could see where deciding whether to part with a cleverly crafted tin container designed with raised and dimpled art deserved a moment of contemplation which is more than I can say for the need to waste decision-making neurons on belly lint.

What’s in your cabinet?

Maybe never has the phrase “to each his own” been truer than in the subject of what people collect.

Think about things stored in a closet, drawer, cupboard or cabinet in your house that you have pulled out over the years and wondered whether to keep or toss. It could be important some day, you say to yourself. It’s a bit of history. Nostalgia increases your heart rate or saddens your mood. Every time you think it’s time to let go of whatever it is, your hand stops in mid-air. You lower your hand slowly and put whatever it is back where it was. You can’t explain exactly what makes you keep it but you can’t quite make yourself part with it.

I have magazines like that, one with a photo of Bobby Kennedy on the cover, another with JFK. I still have schoolwork my daughter created. She’s 59. And yet the minute the shampoo bottle is empty, I rush it to the trash so as not to be a collector of things I don’t need. I can’t stand clutter, cannot think or work amidst it.

By now, you may be asking yourself, where is this conversation going? With all the important issues in the world, national economies dangling on the tenterhooks of tariffs, deportation by force without due process, threats of action for anyone who doesn’t carry a “real ID” in a matter of weeks, Bahamians in limbo abroad and those of us at home wondering how we are going to make it if one more price hike is thrust upon us.

Anyhow, with all the serious issues staring down at us, why would I stop for even a moment and dwell on the subject of what we collect?

Just breathe

Here’s why. Sometimes, in the swirling mass happening around and to us that we have no power over, we need to stop, inhale, and just breathe. And as we do, if we breathe deeply enough and exhale slowly, we look around and our eyes rest on things we can change.

We may not be able to solve the world’s problems, but we can make peace with our own surroundings, our immediate environment. So a few weeks back when I started re-doing one room (Tribune column, April 4, 2025, The Things You Keep) I inadvertently started on this journey of separating the need-to or want-to-keep-stuff from the head-scratching, what-in-the-world-was-I-thinking-stuff and I hit a wall when it came to debatables like records and magazines so I decided to look up the value of old records which led to sites about things people collect. (There is actually a website called Invaluable.com, packed with information though the following story did not come from there. I pieced it together from various sources.)

$2 million for a single record

If you Google the highest price ever paid for a single record, the result is a stunner - $2 million. Turing Pharmaceuticals founder Martin Shkreli raised his paddle at a live auction and doled out the seven-figure sum for the album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” by Wu-Tang Clan, a hip hop group that despite its name was from Staten Island, NY.

Only one copy of the record was ever produced and Wu-Tang Clan, the group that soared to popularity in the early 1990s, only performed the music live on stage once. Shkreli might have been living large when he raised that paddle, but the glamour faded fast. Two years later, he was convicted of securities fraud and had to sell his possessions to pay legal fees and debt.

On a more realistic scale, rarity and condition determine pricing for records that collectors buy and trade, records in covers that you may have buried in a closet, unable to part with since you don’t get lyrics and pages of photo inserts and inside stories when you stream. It’s just not the same.

But back to value. The Beatles White Album and others by the Fabulous Four continue to draw big bucks but so does a vintage Doris Day vinyl in mint condition. An original Frank Sinatra from 1955 or the first Elvis album simply called Elvis Presley released by RCA Victor in 1956 with that unforgettable sultry, sexy bolting out a song, mouth wide open, eyes shut tight photo on the cover, in mint condition could bring enough to pay for a college education for twins.

Albums by Billie Holiday, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Johnny Cash are more sought after today than when they came out nearly 60 or 70 years ago. Others of a particular music genre, blues, jazz, early country and western, gospel, selling in genre groups by different artists or three albums by a single artist might make the cut. It’s all about condition.

Prices vary from $20 to thousands with the highest bids for those albums never unsealed though it is hard to understand why someone would have purchased one and decided against listening to it. And by the way, if you doubt the resurgence, some 27.5 million records were sold in the US alone in 2020. Despite that, the last Sam Goody record store was slated to close this winter. At its height, the retailer was a staple in the retail entertainment industry with 800 locations in the US and UK.

I remember standing in one in New York City, fascinated by aisles and aisles of records of every musical artist, every genre, every generation, stacked in their bins. You could pull one out and take it to a small listening room before deciding to buy.

There was Carter’s Record Shop on East Bay Street, one of the first Black-owned businesses in what was then a predominantly white-owned district. Going to Carter’s was a family affair. Then along came cassette tapes and home videos, stores like Blockbuster’s and like everything else that changed the music and movie industry, the more we were able to do, watch, listen to and stream at home or wherever we were, the less we felt the need to dress up, drive, park and enter a brick and mortar establishment, regardless of who owned it.

Now as cycles do what cycles do, and we are witnessing a soft return of music on vinyl, collectors are finding increasing ways to buy and trade online and new sites are opening to rev up the spin on the revived market.

So maybe it does pay to hold on to some of those old records but the man who has amassed a collection of 675 back scratchers is still an enigma. And the folks with the belly button lint, or the man with the largest Nicorette gum ball, well, I don’t even know what to say about them except to end where this column started. Apparently, there is a collector for everything. I’m just going to make what I save count. Anyone have an old Underwood or Royal typewriter they don’t need?