There’s nothing like moving cross-country to make you hate your stuff. And there’s nothing like a good flea market to make you forget that you hate moving and you have too much stuff already.
Yesterday, at the Elkhorn Flea Market (where all the accompanying photographs were taken), I almost bought a table–a big, beautiful table–long and wide and made from barnwood polished up to a shine. Eight people could easily play Apples to Apples at this table. The previous owner had invited his friends over and let them scratch their names into the surface. His friend Colin had clearly spent the entire evening focused on the task; if my name were Colin, I’d have purchased the table without a second thought. A few inches below the giant, gothic-fonted COLIN, was a sloppy little signature that read Lowell Herr. Lowell is a hard name to find on personalized pencils or those little tin license plates you buy for the back of your bicycle. I always check for Lowell keychains in the airport because Lowell is my husband’s name. This was the extra-push needed to inquire about the table’s price.
The vendor nodded and asked, “Are you from around here?” I told him I was and he settled in to his storytelling voice, confident I’d be able to appreciate the regional details. “All right then, let me tell you little about the history of that table.” I called Lowell over–he had to hear this! Surely the tale we’d hear about the table, even if it were fabricated to inflate the price, would seal the deal (despite the fact that we’re currently apartmentless, and not too likely to wind up in a place in Boston big enough to house so grand a table).
I don’t even need to condense the man’s story; all he told me was that the table was from a town up north, it wasn’t that old, and that the previous owner had invited his friends over to carve their names into the wood. This last bit I could tell by looking at it, and the other details added nothing to the table’s appeal. “Oh, and it wobbles pretty bad,” he added. We walked back over to test the table–how had we failed to notice it quaking at the slightest touch before? “Yep,” he said, “just hammer some dowels into the base and this would be a real nice outdoor table. Better’n a picnic table.” I have no yard and no dowel-know-how, but I didn’t want to tell the man this. Instead, I pointed at the tiny Lowell Herr signature, the table shuddering at the touch. “That’s his name,” I said, putting my arm around Lowell. “Oh yeah?” the man said, unimpressed. “I really don’t want to haul this thing back today. I’ll knock ten bucks off.” Why he couldn’t have just pretended the discount was due to the serendipity of the signature, I don’t know. Why he bothered to tell me the table’s story without the least embellishment, I don’t know. You don’t go to the flea market looking for that kind of honesty–it’s boring. You go to haggle, to imagine, to nod and pretend you believe the outlandish origin stories ascribed to a stack of bowls or baseball cards–that every other of its kind is burned or broken, even though you saw an identical set an hour earlier in the livestock barn. You go to find the things you had before and still remember, and the things you’ll live to lose and miss and remember yet.
More stuff about stuff:
- Significant Objects is an awesome project (with a super-informative and fun website to boot).
- If you’re going to be in Berlin, don’t miss the amazing Museum der Dinge. If you live in Berlin, and want to create and curate a new museum, I have an idea for you.
- Jay’s great post from last week, “Things You Only See Through Other Things.” (& it’s to be continued!)
- I love this Frightened Rabbit song, “Things.” Belt it out!
- This American Life Episode #199, “House on Loon Lake.” This is such a beautiful episode; here’s an excerpt from the part where the music starts to swell:
-And here’s a spoon… [deep sigh]. It’s all very melancholy, these little remnants.
-Why is it melancholy?
-The abandonment. The abandonment is melancholy. In a way, it’s worse than throwing away, much worse. I can understand one family being obliged to flee or run or abandon. But that nobody else cared, that it was so overwhelmingly abandoned, by everybody, that nobody had cared to solve something, to resolve something, that was very offensive to me. That was–you know it was like leaving a corpse, you don’t leave corpses. And that’s a little bit the feeling that I had. That here was a carcass, a carcass of a house, of a life“and nobody cared to pick it up and give it a proper burial. I thought that it was important that somebody should care, that somehow somebody was leaning over these words, you know, reading them, unfolding these letters that somebody had bothered to write. And it really didn’t matter that was an eleven-year-old boy who cared. Objects have lives; they are witness to things.