4 posts tagged “treasure”
Before you get all excited, it's just a hypothetical victory.
As for the "graveyard" part of this post, it's an odd story. On my walk home from the gym, I pass a house which is clearly a garage sale graveyard--piled high with junk and treasure and junk that might have once been treasure.
I finally finished "decorating" my office with an item I salvaged from the the Brain Tumor Hall moving extravaganza.
The English Department decided to part with this gem:
I love all the various cat/mirror/light interplay going on in this pic. (Here's my question--they invented anti-red-eye technology for cameras, but when will they invent anti-yeem technology? After all, at least 35% of all photos taken in America are of peoples' cats. Right?)
If you're wondering what sorts of things are on a Literary Map of New England, let me offer you a sample:
When I lived in Florida, I worked for several years at a domestic violence shelter. One of shelter's income sources was a thrift store, where my office was located. I spent a lot of time kvetching with my co-workers, and a lot of time organizing donations and corralling volunteers. The DUI diversion volunteers were by far the hardest to corral, but not nearly as hard to wrangle as the customers.
One thing about working at a donation center/thrift store in Florida--you see the much loved and now abandoned detritus of the lives of old people who came to Florida for their sunset years. They left behind home, friends, and family in Wisconsin, New York, Ohio, and they came to Florida...to die. And their stuff? It came to us, if the family in Wisconsin was unable or unwilling to make the trip to Florida to sort it out. Sometimes, they hired movers to bring the entire house full of stuff to our warehouse. Sometimes we just received whatever didn't sell at the estate sale.
Always we got treasure. The things that fall through the cracks of distant, indifferent relatives and the crush of estate auctions. Like this little box. Some little old lady had tucked this away in a sewing machine box, and no one thought to look there. No one thought to look for grandma's "old keep sakes." Perhaps no one knew there were such things, but more likely no one wanted to drive down from Ohio to sort through a condo full of velvet track suits and Reader's Digest.
No one in Ohio wondered what had become of that gold and silver brooch that held a picture of Great-great-grandmother Mary Jane Winterham. She's the rather austere looking old woman with the white lace collar.
I don't know who she was, but she belongs to me now.
I bought her granddaughter's old Singer Featherweight sewing machine for $12.00, with my employee discount. I sold it on ebay for $170. When I went to list it for sale, though, I unpacked the box, to array all the various accessories and parts for a photograph. That's what I expected to find in the little blue pouch tucked in beside the sewing machine. Instead I found Mary Jane Winterham.
As I mentioned before, there is a great migration going on in Brain Tumor Hall. Despite the lamentable disrepair and dangerous air quality in the building, the college administration built on more offices this spring. So, while two lucky departments are moving into the new space, the rest of us are moving our grad students up from the basement. In the process, many professors are getting new furniture and parting with decades worth of junk. Those of us in the "lesser" departments have been vulturing the hallways all week, scouting out treasure.
The sad/happy fact is that many of the desks, cabinets and chairs being discarded are nicer than what our grad students currently have, so we've been wandering in the forest of discards, tagging things to be moved to our new offices. In the process, we've found a few treasures for ourselves.
Somebody took home a Cyrillic typewriter of 1940's vintage. Someone else hauled away an enormous piece of micro-fiche reading equipment. I scored a pile of old maps. Look, Flanny is conquering France. Oh, God, she's stepping on Montpellier!
Hubby came by on his way from work and helped me "recycle" a seven-foot Steelcase bookshelf for our garage (perfect for storing cans of paint and tools), and also picked up this old beauty of a desk chair.
There are dozens of these indestructible old things sitting in the halls, alongside ten-year old plastic desk chairs that have already gone tits up. I just don't get the urge to discard everything old for something new. Sure, sometimes new is nice. I like new underwear, and I love a new notebook, but I've never had a new desk chair as nice as this one, which was marked "trash." Sure, it's not that pretty, but it's comfortable and come Armageddon, you could ride a chair like that all the way to the gates of Hell. *cough* If you were going there.
