Collections: Who Is the Next Keeper?
In the morning he asked himself a different question.
Picture a man named Ben-Ami, 73, a widower who has collected jazz records for fifty years. They fill four tall shelves in his living room, and each one has a pencil mark on the sleeve showing where he found it. He is moving abroad. His daughter Zoe loves her father and lives in a small apartment with no turntable.
A dealer came, looked along the shelves and offered one price for the whole lot, to be collected on Friday. Ben-Ami said he would think about it. He lay awake that night. The price was fair. He could not stop picturing the records stacked in boxes in a warehouse, with nobody to tell anyone where a single one came from.
In the morning he asked himself a different question. Who is the next keeper? A collection built in pieces, he realized, could have several keepers.
He went to the record shop on his street and described the idea to the young man at the counter. Theo, 19, had a turntable and a milk crate of used records, and he asked to see the 1950s trumpet albums. Ben-Ami gave him twenty of them the next day. He told Theo where each one came from, and Theo wrote the stories on the back of the sleeves.
His late wife Ruth had put a small star on the sleeve of the twelve records she loved most. Those he set aside for Zoe, who could keep them in a box until she owned a turntable.
| Part of the collection | Next keeper | What Ben-Ami gets |
|---|---|---|
| 1950s trumpet albums | Theo, who plays them | Watching them be played |
| Twelve records Ruth starred | Zoe, who keeps them in a box | A reason to call on Sunday |
| Records that were duplicates | The music room at a nearby school | Students hearing them for the first time |
| Twelve favorites | Ben-Ami, packed for the trip | A small piece of home |
"Theo asked me what the third song on side two was," Ben-Ami told Zoe on the phone. "Nobody has asked me that in ten years." Zoe said she would call again on Sunday and asked him to tell her about that one too.
You could…
- Sort your collection into the parts you loved for different reasons.
- Ask a club, a shop owner or a teacher who is looking for what you have.
- Write a sentence about where each special piece came from, and hand it over with the piece.
Who do you picture as the next keeper of something you have gathered? Write to us with your answer. A reader choosing a keeper for a collection could be helped by your thinking.
Tell us in the comments