In the Middle Ages, an ancient ancestor of mine, an itinerant stick-bundler named Stephyn Stickbundler, purchased a piece of the true cross from a certain Friar Swaggert, a ruddy-faced cleric who wandered the countryside selling Pope-approved indulgences and other ineffable ephemera.
This holy artifact has remained in my family's possession ever since, safely stored in an old eyeglass case along with our other heirlooms: miscellaneous plastic buttons and a yellowed instruction booklet describing how to operate a tabletop pencil sharpener. Obviously, I've always been keen to know exactly how precious this inheritance is, so I took the eyeglass case and its contents along with me to 'The Antiques Roadshow' when that show came to Boston recently. Unfortunately, the experience was rather chastening.
"You have some very, very interesting items here," the appraiser told me. "These buttons, for instance. I would guess that they were mass produced by a machine in a Hong Kong factory somewhere between 1972 and 1978."
"Yes I think they probably were," I agreed. "They fell off an old brown polyester raincoat that my dad used to wear around that time."
"Well, isn't that fascinating," he said. "But it's too bad you don't have the rest of the coat with you because then you could donate it to the Salvation Army. As it is, I'm afraid the buttons by themselves are probably worth somewhere in the region of absolutely nothing at all."
"Oh dear." I mumbled, somewhat disappointed.
"But not to worry," he said encouragingly. "You do have this fabulous tabletop pencil sharpener instruction booklet, printed by Herbert Greaves in 1968. But again, I notice that you don't have the actual pencil sharpener itself."
"Yes that's quite correct. My uncle Tom threw it away when the glass bit that collected all the pencil shavings got cracked."
"And again I'm afraid that that's really too bad, because without the pencil sharpener the instruction booklet really serves no purpose and therefore has zero market value. Still, the booklet does have a small coffee stain in the lower right hand corner, probably created by your uncle when he was learning how to sharpen his pencils and was drinking a cup of coffee at the same time, which makes for a nice little family memento of your obviously rather sloppy and apparently mechanically challenged uncle, which you can either keep for future generations to laugh at or you can burn in the incinerator. It's entirely up to you. I have no opinion on the matter."
"Oh."
"Yes indeed: put a dollar sign in front of that last 'oh' and you have the approximate value of your heirlooms so far ... but moving swiftly along, we now come to the major item in your collection, a piece of the true cross on which Jesus was supposedly crucified."
"Yes. It's been in the family for nearly seven hundred years."
"So has a history of insanity by the sound of things. But never mind. I would conservatively estimate the value at auction of this tiny old bit of rotting wood at nine million dollars."
"Wow. I'm flabbergasted. That's amazing. Gosh. Do you really think so?"
"No. Not really." the appraiser sniggered. "What I just said what a piece of the true bullshit."
"Oh. I see"
"Yes. Now bugger off, take these boring objects with you, and don't come back."
As the audience laughed and pointed, I quietly gathered up my possessions and walked out of the studio with as much dignity as I could muster.
And the moral of this story is: Family trees, we all have our cross to bear.