GUILDERLAND CENTER — Donald Vosburgh learned early in life about the power that possessions have to give comfort.

Vosburgh was born with a craniofacial condition that caused him to have 21 surgeries between the time he was six months old until he was 18.

He spent a year of his childhood confined to bed so that he wouldn’t move and one of his surgeries would be allowed to heal correctly. He doesn’t remember how old he was.

After his operation, a boy was wheeled into his room who was in an iron lung, he said. Vosburgh had just received a teddy bear from his parents. The boy looked at it and said, “I like your teddy bear.” The boy had no family with him.

Vosburgh climbed out of bed, walked over, and gave the boy his bear, placing it on the shelf where the boy’s head — the only part of his body not inside the breathing machine — rested. The next morning, the boy was dead.

“It was the only thing he had,” he said, his eyes filling with tears.

Vosburgh began collecting things at about that time. He started with old comic books (“I always loved the old comic books when they were 10 cents a book”) and baseball cards (“What kid didn’t?”).

Finally, he got into records and music, he said, and “got out of the rest of it.” He estimates that he had 3,000 or 4,000 records at one point, including many “picture discs” — albums the size of 33s with outsize photos of the singer on each side.

Now 68, he lives in half of a room in the nursing home in Guilderland Center. He is in liver and kidney failure but hopes to put off a hospital visit because he is loathe to leave his things. It’s not about their economic value. It’s about connection.

The framed photo of Johnny Cash on top of a closet across from where he sits by the room’s only window “makes me remember that he’s still with me,” said Vosburgh, who is on oxygen and has a pacemaker.

“I saw all these stars,” he said. “They’re dead and gone, but I got to see them, and shook their hands.”

Cash is his favorite. Vosburgh had a keyring in the form of a letter “C” made at Mayfair Jewelers years ago. He told the jeweler that he would be seeing Cash in concert at Proctor’s in Schenectady and that he planned to give it to him.

And he did. “I got to put it in his hand,” Vosburgh said.

The smaller objects he values most are in the locked drawer of his nightstand. He wears the key around his wrist on a chain that says “Willie Nelson Backstage Pass.”

The drawer contains a Bible given him by a Catholic priest who is a frequent visitor and an old hardcover copy of “From Cradle to Grave: The Short Lives and Strange Deaths of Marybeth Tinning’s Nine Children.” Tinning stood trial for the death of one of her babies, leading to the suspicion that she had killed all nine.

Vosburgh says he knew Tinning’s husband, who worked at General Electric at the same time he did. He did other work, too: operating a crane and driving trucks and forklifts as well as taxis and buses.

Music catalogs stashed in the drawer remind him of the names of half-forgotten songs.

Behind him on the wall are a pair of license plates, one reading “SISSY,” and the other “BUD SISSY.” Bud and Sissy are the main characters in “Urban Cowboy,” which Vosburgh calls “a hell of a movie.” The film was shot at Gilley’s Club, a sprawling honkytonk outside of Houston, Texas, co-owned by country star Mickey Gilley, whose picture adorns another wall in Vosburgh’s room.

Vosburgh says he met Gilley four or five times. “I was on Mickey Gilley’s bus,” he says.

On the wall behind him is a photo of Charlie Pride, a nod to a friend and fellow collector who is a huge fan of Pride. “But I always tell him,” Vosburgh says, leaning in with a conspiratorial smile, “Charlie Pride couldn’t put a pimple on Johnny Cash’s ass.”

Vosburgh is blunt about what will happen to all the stuff after his death. He shrugs. “My kids don’t want it. They had a chance to take whatever they wanted, before I came in here.

“You should have seen all the stuff I got rid of,” he says. “Autographed books, photos of stars, right in the trash.”

Vosburgh has no pictures of family on the walls. “They’re all in there,” he said, gesturing to the closet. “I’m running out of room.”

His family life has not been smooth. Divorced twice, Vosburgh is in touch with only one of his three children. “My second ex-wife is in here, too,” he says of the nursing home.

His great-grandfather owned the large parcel that became Vosburgh Road but lost it for back taxes, because of drinking, Vosburgh said; he is buried there somewhere.

Whether or not his 8-by-10 Loretta Lynn photo and his black hoodie with an image of Marilyn Monroe on the front were really stolen, as he believes, Vosburgh holds tight to his collections.

Bruce Gendron, regional administrator for The Grand Healthcare, which owns and operates the facility where Vosburgh lives, says, “If we can find out that something for sure was brought in and went missing on our watch, we’ll try to make the person whole — whether with money or by replacing it.”

The nursing home did replace Vosburgh’s terry-cloth bathrobe that went missing, Gendron and Vosburgh agree.

“For the residents, it’s home, but it’s also a community situation, with people coming and going,” said Gendron. “We can’t really police everyone who comes in to visit. If there is something we can identify as theft, though, we’ll call the Guilderland Police Department.”

Often the police are “a little bit at a loss,” Gendron said, “unless there’s a pattern, and we haven’t had anything like that.”

Vosburgh doesn’t mean to single out this particular nursing home as having a problem. “It’s happening everywhere,” he says. Some of his items might have been misplaced, he says.

His abdomen is filling with fluid, he says. He’s in a lot of pain, and he needs to have paracentesis done every so often to remove the fluid, but he hopes to put it off as long as possible.

The last time he went to the hospital, he says, when he came back, his Norelco razor was gone. The company sent him a new one, with a new charger.

“I’m tired of losing things,” Vosburgh says.

He still receives several mail-order catalogs, but tries to keep himself from ordering anything new.

“Nowhere to put it,” he says.

Corrected on April 27, 2018. We had misspelled the name of the jeweler who made a key ring for Johnny Cash; it is Mayfair, not Wayfair.