Yesterday, I went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s craft show, an annual event that takes up a hall of the Convention Center. I’ve been to it several times before. Craftspeople sit in curtained alcoves in long rows, displaying their products on artistically lighted draped surfaces or hanging from racks, some of them continuing to work on making things in the back of their booths, others standing or sitting making eye contact with the passing crowd.

I am not really a customer at these events, though I happily pay the admission fee.

For one thing, every lovely object is priced appropriately for the amount of labor that goes into it. That woven scarf? Three hundred dollars. The interesting miniature metalwork watertowers? Thousands. The one thing I really loved, a small lamp with metal chicken feet? $1500. If artists are to be paid for their work at even a penurious rate, that’s what it costs, something that a lot of people in the Amazon/Shein era do not understand. I do buy things sometimes that cost a lot, I admit. But they have to be valuable enough. And value is a personal thing.

It isn’t just the cost that’s the problem. It’s partly that I can’t actually use anything at the show. Jewelry of any kind, for instance, is out of the question. I already have two gold signet rings and a gold chain that I wear, plus plain gold rings that I never take out of my piercings, but I’m too impatient for anything else. I have all the furniture I need. I own some colorful pottery my friend Rebecca made, which I paid well for, but otherwise Fiestaware pretty much does it for me, and I have enough of that. I don’t need boxes, hand-made knives, or elaborate ceramic birds designed to be attached, as a flock, to a wall. I have spent several years getting rid of things, I don’t dust, and I still have enough decorative objects, thank you.

But when it comes down to it, the problem is I don’t really like anything in that show. I like leather, but I don’t like rough-edged hand-dyed envelope bags. I like clothes, but I’m not big on kimonos or drapey blocks of silk. Even the hand-turned wooden fountain pens with palladium plating on the hardware just didn’t do it for me, though I collect pens and though the prices were appropriate; they were perfectly serviceable pens, and better than the ones I see at fountain pen shows, which isn’t saying much. Hand-turned wooden pens always look like chair legs to me, and the hardware is inevitably uninteresting.

I ran into my friend Beth while I was there, and though she is not any wealthier than I am, she is exactly the demographic for that show. She told me she had gotten another scarf from a vendor she bought from previously, and had purchased a pair of earrings to go with the necklace she bought at the show in an earlier year. She is a retired interior designer. Like me, she wears the uniform of an older woman who doesn’t need to impress anyone (in her case, trim trousers, a long sleeved tee, a tidy fleece jacket, in my case jeans, a sweater, and yes a long sleeved tee). But expensive woven scarfs and blocky earrings make sense to her; she can use them, and she likes them. So suddenly, the cost becomes reasonable.

Later, I met up with my adult kid in Rittenhouse Square, and I had been thinking about the conundrum of value. I said that though I couldn’t see spending on anything at the crafts show, a Pelikan M1000 in the green stripe makes sense to me. My kid looked it up, and it costs nearly $800. It’s an immense pen, made by a solid German manufacturer, and it performs well. I could see that they were considering a Christmas present, but I hope not. I have Pelikan M600 and an M200 already, plus a vintage Pelikan I never actually use.

In fact, I have a little clear case containing perhaps forty fountain pens, many of them costing hundreds of dollars, and if they ever haul me away to a nursing home in a near-vegetative state, I will take that little case with me, whether I can still write by hand or not.

Which is to say I will try to understand why anyone could possibly desire vast wooden urns painted to resemble multicolored ceramics, or quasi-Victorian plaques containing gold-plated butterflies, for that matter. If I say to myself, “They are like fountain pens,” perhaps I can make sense of other people’s purchases.