“Where’s my old baseball glove?” he asked.

“What old baseball glove?” she asked.

“You know the one I had from back in my Little League days.”

“Where did you put it?” she asked.

“Right here in this blue bin that’s been in the basement for who knows how long.”

“Oh, I emptied that bin a few months ago and I threw everything out,” she said. “I’m getting rid of the clutter. Been driving me crazy.”

“You threw away my glove?” he shouted. “That’s my very first ever baseball glove. How could you?”

“Oh, c’mon. It’s been sitting in that bin forever just taking up space.”

He felt like she had shot a cannonball through his stomach.

Most everyone has boxes and bins of stuff collected through the years. When they get stacked up to the ceiling, and the pathways to walk through the basement become narrower and narrower, a purging begins, and what once were considered cherished tokens from yesteryear are now nothing more than … junk.

TV shows like “American Pickers” urge us to hold onto stuff that someone someday will pay top dollar to buy, and then “Hoarders” sends us scurrying to our closets and basements with a mindset that if this thing goes to the trash, then that thing goes, too. Before long we take a satisfying deep breath because we can see the bare floor again.

But questions remain. Should everything that no longer has practical purpose be hauled away to the landfill? Does the sentimental value we place on certain things make them worth keeping?

Looking at my old baseball glove, my high school yearbook, a Christmas decoration handmade by Uncle Steve 40 years ago sends me into a sudden time travel to wonderful moments of the past. The diving catch I made in right center field with that glove, the signature of a classmate who would die in Vietnam, a wood-carved reindeer from Uncle Steve who used to tell me jokes until I laughed through my tears. All this stuff brings me smiles again and again.

According to the website, FindStorageFast, other than for sentimental reasons, we keep things for three other purposes. Some of our stuff has market value. The Barbie doll in the box that’s been in the attic for years, the Japanese sword Grandpa brought home from the war, the baseball signed by the 1963 New York Yankees all can be sold for some serious cash if these items are authenticated.

We also keep things because they have a practical or utility value. That old nut grinder still works. You find in the basement a metal ice cube tray with a release lever in a storage box and you put it to use.

The website also says we “keep things for later.” The dollhouse made 10 years ago will be handed down to a granddaughter. The Lionel train set that comes out once a year to run under the Christmas tree will be a nice heirloom for a son.

Writer Amy Butcher states something we all have to say is true. We get emotionally attached to our stuff, and she suggests we need to get over it.

Unless we are hoarding, which is a sign of depression and anxiety, I would respond to Butcher and say, “What’s wrong with being emotionally attached to vinyl record albums from the 1960s or a set of china that Grandma used in 1950?

We get rid of our stuff and we stare at the empty bin, the space on the floor, and this makes us happy, especially if we find better use for the area once consumed.

Understood.

Yet I have absolutely nothing from my parents except a ring my father wore once or twice. I really wish I had some more of their “stuff.”

Keepsakes saved for the next generation of family can put us as close as we can get to feeling the life of the person who has since passed away.

I often see handmade objects at garage sales that have lost sentimental value with the homeowners. I paid five bucks for a beautifully handcrafted electric guitar body made out of maple wood by a high school student in his shop class. I don’t intend to equip the guitar for playing capability, but I will put a nice finish on the wood and display it somewhere in my home.

I guess it’s true that one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure. The stuff worth keeping, however, helps define the character of the person. If I never met you and yet if I could look through your attic or your basement, I could tell a lot about the kind of person you are.

My legacy to my kids will be everything from fishing stuff to photos of me from my childhood baseball and football days to volumes of my written words.

If they sell my stuff at a garage sale and use the written papers for kindling in the fireplace, I won’t be around to shed a tear.

If they decide to keep any of it, they’ll have boxes of memories of me and hold onto a piece of my soul that they might someday give away to their own children.

Rich Strack can be reached at katehep11@gmail.com.