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

At twenty, 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. 

At thirty, 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. When I retired, I threw away every sample of every ad, brochure, video and direct mail piece I had ever written. What was the point of saving them? I’m not going to be applying for copywriting jobs anytime soon.

The year I turned forty, 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 fifty, I would have run back inside for the 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 sixty, I would have tried to remove the framed poster hanging above the sofa in our living room. It was produced around the turn of the last century by the Deles-Paul Chocolate Company, and features six kids happily being drenched in melted chocolate. Over the years, we have accumulated an extensive collection of vintage French posters -- mostly travel -- but that was the first and it's still my favorite. It was in terrible shape when we impulse-bought it at a Montreal flea market in the summer of 1983. A previous owner had used Magic Markers to retouch paint chips that had flaked off. It was torn, creased, stained and moldy. We spent $1,000, a lot of money in those days of early parenthood, to have it restored. The guy at the flea market had no idea what he was selling. We would have no trouble selling it for five figures.

I am 73 as I write this. If our house caught fire today and I could only take one thing, that decision would be 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 in their nicest clothes. The six year-old, a redhead, was wearing a seersucker jacket with a clip-on bowtie. His three year old blond brother was in a sailor suit.  Before dinner, I took them  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 World 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 our homes ever since. They look miserable but damn, they are adorable. If I could relive one specific moment of my 73 years, that would be it.

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.