He spent his life collecting things - original signed art works, statues, French furniture, designer apparel - gathering them together in a showplace home in an upscale neighborhood, surrounding himself with the finest beauty and art. None of it offered much comfort when the money ran out and the bills came due and onto the auction block it all went, to pay the light bill and buy groceries.
There is an intense sadness to this, a reminder of how wealth cannot buy happiness and a lesson about the value of things. Those who live the highest, fall the lowest, my grandmother might say, and material things are still only things, no matter their pedigree or market worth. They can't buy a good nights sleep or a contented soul, can't fill the real emptiness of a life gone badly off track. They may be a long way from cinder block bookcases and second hand dishes in a four story walk up but in the end, they're still just things - passing from hand to hand, house to house, and finally being sacrificed for utility bills, a carton of cigarettes, a gallon of gas or the next fix. Image, as my grandmother did say, Don't feed the bulldog.
The public will descend like a flock of crows picking over the remains. They will examine and inspect and hand over their cash for all these treasures, carting them off in pick up trucks and suburban suv's. They will chatter, judge and appraise, bargain, barter and complain at the prices, not realizing or perhaps not caring that these things constitute the measure of a man and his flaws and failings. If fortune should smile, there may be enough profit for him to start again - if he has learned the lessons of things, he may succeed again, even though it's a long and rocky road back.
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