I come by my love for things old, odd, and unusual naturally. It’s an outgrowth of the magical hours spent in my grandfather’s basement, a musty, damp, and cavernous space he had subdivided with plywood partitions into “rooms” and then completely filled with enough old stuff to fill an antique store… and a junk shop. He was a “picker” before his time. Among his treasures: a Civil War drum and an old Edison gramophone, the kind with the big metal horn, painted with flowers.

For us, Grampa’s basement was the Hearst Castle of playhouses. Best of all, he let us crank up the gramophone. Upon minutes of our arrival — and disappearance into the basement, the adults upstairs would be treated to endless renditions of Irving Berlin’s politically incorrect vaudeville ditty “My Wife’s Gone to the County (Hurrah, Hurrah),” the only one of a whole suitcase of wax cylinders that was still playable, the rest having surrendered to green mold. We loved it, of course, but I wonder now how the big people upstairs maintained their sanity!

Perhaps my own fixation with “picking” began in that basement.