If your house caught fire and you could only save one thing ...

If your house were to catch fire and, once your family and pets were safely outside, you realized you had time to go back inside and rescue only one item, what would you choose?

At 10 I would have saved my Lionel electric trains. They were destroyed in my teens by a basement flood during a rainstorm.

At 20 I would have gone back for whatever my mother asked me to get. My father had died six years earlier and our family’s emotional wounds were still raw. She would have probably instructed me to get his overcoat she kept hanging in the front closet. It was finally given to Goodwill last year when mom sold her house and moved to Assisted Living.

At 30 I would have rescued my portfolio. I was a writer for a New York ad agency and advertising professionals were expected to keep leather albums of their best work to show future employers in order to continue their way up the ladder to jobs at bigger and better agencies. I threw away every sample of every ad, brochure, video and direct mail piece I had ever written when I retired from the day-to-day business of running my agency two years ago. What was the point of saving them? I’m not going to be applying for copywriting jobs anytime soon.

The year I turned 40 I ordered a BMW convertible, picked it up in Munich and drove it through five countries – Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and Lichtenstein -- before dropping it off to have it shipped home. I would have backed that baby out of the garage to safety. Six or seven years later, when the top was torn and the transmission was going, I sold it to a used car dealer.

At 50, I would have run back inside for the back-up disk of my company’s financial records I kept at home, just in case something unforeseen happened at the office. You couldn’t have convinced me anything was more important.

At 61, I’ve spent the last two weeks sifting through a lifetime worth of possessions. We’ve sold the Connecticut house in which we raised our family, and are moving to Florida full-time. We're not taking all that much with us. We’ve had a house in Florida for six years and almost everything we have here we already have there, from pizza cutters to big-screen TVs, but the Florida stuff is newer and in better shape. The things we’re taking with us – the piano, a couple of family pieces, the one nice rug we managed to keep our dachshunds away from by placing a baby gate across the entrance to the dining room, winter clothes we'll never wear but might need in case we ever change our minds about living in the tropics, china, our favorite books, etc. – are going into storage.

Everything else – sofas, chairs, coffee tables, end tables, dining tables, bedside tables, beds, dressers, chests, bookcases, kitchen appliances (including a barely-used quesadilla maker), lamps, knick-knacks, paddy-whacks, CDs, even the record collection that includes the first album I ever purchased, the Mamas & Papas' “If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears,” is going to be sold at an “estate sale” two weekends from now. We hired two hyper-efficient women who run such sales to advertise it, price the items, arrange them artfully for maximum appeal, and deal with buyers. What doesn’t sell they’ve promised to clean out and haul away or give to charity so we don't have to deal with it.

Going through a lifetime of accumulation, I couldn’t help but wonder: If I could take just one of these things with me, what would it be?

And that decision was remarkably easy -- a framed snapshot of our sons, ages six and three, standing on the deck of a cruise ship in the summer of 1989.

We had decided to take a short test cruise to determine if a longer cruise was the type of family vacation we might enjoy in the future. Our room had three beds – a double for us and bunk beds for the boys. While there were many kid-friendly activities in which they could have participated, from swimming in the pool to arts/crafts classes to watching movies in the theater, the boys spent almost every waking hour of that cruise climbing, jumping and playing on those stupid bunk beds while arguing, wailing and ultimately coming to blows over who got to sleep on the top one.

The ship’s newsletter advised that, for the captain’s dinner the last night, passengers were expected to dress up. Before we went to the dining room I rousted the boys from the bunk beds on which they were climbing and jumping while wearing the nice clothes their mother had dressed them in, and made them go to the upper deck to pose for a picture.

“Hold hands,” I ordered. They refused. “C’mon guys, pretend you like each other,” I cajoled. Again they refused. “Hold hands, dammit,” I finally barked, “Or we’re not going to Disney when we get back to land.” They reluctantly clasped each others’ hands for one brief moment and I snapped the shot that has been displayed on a shelf in the family room ever since.

Funny but I worked hard all my life to buy nice things and when it comes down to it, the most valuable possession of all  -- the one thing worth more than the rest combined -- turns out to be a photo that probably cost a dime to print at Walgreen’s.