What is your favorite possession?

My apartment in New York is my favorite - my most treasured - possession. My getaway. My cave. The one place where I can close the door on the world. It’s a calming place in my life with lovely soft colors and even softer cushions. And everywhere I look there are little reminders that make me happy - like a carving that Phil and I bought in China or those two puppets from Bali. It’s also a place that permits me to enjoy my other treasures - time with my husband, time with friends and family, time to read the paper, watch TV and walk around barefoot.

By a long shot, the “birthday shoes” my daughter made me for my birthday when she was 9 or 10. They are made of construction paper, painted blue, decorated with lace ribbon and lined with multiple Q-Tips to massage my feet. They are framed and hang in my kitchen next to the later “wedding shoes” she made me when I remarried.

I have a lot of prized possessions – the Maltese Falcon given to me by my college friend Bob Benton after he won the Oscar for “Kramer Vs. Kramer.” It sits near my desk. The Emmy I won for working on WNBC’s “Live at Five,” once New York’s hottest show … an antique Art Deco tennis bracelet given to me by someone whose name I have forgotten … my photos of Fred Astaire and Tom Mix … the mock-up of my memoir Natural Blonde, created as “The F%$#@&* Book,” which is what I came to call it as I was desperately writing it … a pair of diamond panther earrings given to me by the archaeologist Iris Love from the same jeweler who made Marie Antoinette’s infamous necklace. Oh, I’ve got a million of “my favorite things.”

I don’t really have a favorite possession but my bedroom is my favorite place to be.

A few strands of saffron in a glass jar.

My possessions know I don’t play favorites. I love all my possessions equally.

I have a little heart and a little cross that were cut out of a fallen beam of the World Trade Center and given to me by a welder. I keep them on my desk. I have a piece of paper Mother Teresa gave me that will someday be a relic. I met John Paul II and he gave me a pair of rosary beads, and they will be a saint’s relic too someday. I never thought I’d have two saint’s relics. But the thing I have that is most important is the cell phone containing a text message from my son the night he left for college. When I’m on the subway or sitting somewhere I take it out and look at it, like something I just received.

The enormous desk, more of a command post, that my husband designed and built for me, complete with not only file drawers and a hatch for the printer, but also specially sized shelves for my Filofaxes and clippings books.