GREED IS GOOD

     My wife Carol and I went to an Antiques Roadshow held in Hartford recently.  Most interesting.  Thousands upon thousands of us carrying, pushing, and wheeling our treasures for assessment of their history and verification of our new good fortune.  We all had dreams that our items would bring us well-deserved, long-overdue wealth.  And I noticed that no one else's items seemed as valuable as ours:  Two watercolors, one a view of a local mansion's garden, the other a view of a seacoast marsh, one Neapolitan style platter or charger, and an autographed photo of a deceased President of the United States.  After receiving our evaluations, we were pleased and feeling a bit smug - not wealthy but feeling pretty good about ourselves.  However, while departing, we heard the story of a woman who had brought in a rather ugly avant garde modernistic painting by a generally unknown artist that was evaluated at $500,000.  She was shocked.  We were, too.  Suddenly we didn't feel so smug.

    The trip was a success in regards to meeting nice people, but it was even more successful in realizing how folks, perhaps, over-value our material goods and how we all strive to rise above the crowd, hopefuly fortuitously.  The saying, "Greed is good!" seems far more cynical in reality than it did when spoken by the actor Michael Douglas.