Martin Spitznagel Pianist. Composer. Writer. Filmmaker.

Goodwill to Men

Well, Christmas has come and gone. No matter how much Christmas music I listen to or shopping I do, it seems like I never am ready for the day when it comes, and then it’s all over like a night in Vegas. It’s like your wedding day only with more reindeer (unless you are, in fact, a reindeer yourself, in which case I suppose you’d have reindeer relatives).

It’s been a very weird Christmas so far. We spent months shopping for people, and we received many nice gifts on Christmas day, and then today we worked to clear out a family member’s house – he’s moved into assisted living and is getting rid of his property – and took truckload after truckload of trinkets and knick-knacks and old Christmas gifts to Goodwill.

It was a surreal contrast. On the one hand we were excited on Christmas to get gifts, to open presents, to watch others open their presents, and then two days later we were besieged by the accumulated detritus of a lifetime, by the weight of possessions and property. It definitely was enough to give me pause and wonder about what is actually valuable.

The things that I think are valuable – our photo albums, for instance – really have no lasting value at all. Jess and I take a lot of pictures – thousands upon thousands, as our Facebook friends can attest – but who is going to give a shit about those when we’re old? No one. They’ll go through and discard them like we went through and discarded things today.

Now, being my grandmother’s grandson, I was raised to respect the value of things. She taught me that every item has a story, every memento has a memory, and that even things that don’t appear to be valuable can have value. It’s a lesson I learned well, and it comes in especially handy when you’re going through someone’s old things. Well, that is if anyone will listen to you. My wife has no such love of things, and looked at today’s task as a game of “How Fast Can We Throw This Away?” While I respected her talent at that game (she is exceptional at discarding things, especially my things), for me its akin to taking a flamethrower to a corn field in order to get rid of the weeds. Do you kill the weeds? Yes. But you take the food with them.

Here’s a picture of some speakers that were in the person’s basement. I wanted them because I was looking for some speakers to go with my HiFi system at home, and they were heavy and were built like tanks and made of real wood. My wife argued that they were “ugly” and “too big.” I returned fire, citing their build quality and the fact that vintage audio components can be valuable, but I lost, and so now Goodwill has them.

For fun, I snapped a picture and researched the model number, Pioneer CS-99a, when we got back in range of the internet.

Google “Pioneer CS-99a”. See what comes up.

It turns out that audiophiles will sell their left nut to get these sought-after vintage speakers, which sell for $250 apiece (the speakers, not the nuts). We gave Goodwill two perfect ones today, so if anyone’s by the Greensburg, PA, Goodwill in the next week, I would snap. those. babies. up. You might get lucky and find them being sold unwittingly for $75. In the meantime, I will be sitting over here continuing to play my Xbox while crying into my headphones.

The speakers were never really mine to begin with, so I’m not upset about it, but I think it’s an excellent case study of why the slash-and-burn strategy when it comes to stuff is a bad idea. Sometimes the item that catches your eye or you think is pretty is, in fact, worthless, while the item that looks like it fell from the Ugly Tree can be worth a lot.

Grandma-san, it seems, has taught me well.

I snapped some more pictures of things we gave to Goodwill that I thought we should sell on eBay but didn’t. The only upside is that someone who knows what to look for will find some treasures if they go looking. That would be my Grandma’s silver-lining view of all this: Our loss will be somebody else’s delight when they find out that those odd-looking speakers they bought on a lark at Goodwill are worth 500 fucking dollars.

Here’s the Sansui 3300 receiver that powered the speakers.

Here’s a pimp-ass word processor by Smith Corona (Smith Corona PWP 3800) back when word processors were competing with typerwriters and computers and no one was sure which would come out on top. Cool!

And finally, here’s the record player that plugged into the Sansui and played through the speakers. It’s a Garrard Zero 100, one of the easier-to-find models by Garrard and a favorite of collectors.

So what is that, a $650 donation to Goodwill? I suppose there are worse places for things to go. But it’s scary, if you ask me, to think about how much our American life is devoted to the acquisition of things and how most of them end up at a place like Goodwill, the ugly and the beautiful alike. The creepy question in my mind, and boy do I have one, is what do you give someone for Christmas that will actually matter in 50 years? What of anything that exists now will matter in 100? And how can we own/create/care for as much of that as possible before, like a night in Vegas or Christmas with the family, it’s all over too soon?