Old Friends
Our neighbor to the right is the executor of the estate of the neighbor to her right, who died at a ripe old age just before we moved in. While we were in escrow, there was an estate sale to try to clean out the old lady's house, but among the things that didn't sell were beds and dressers and armchairs and armoires and a whole room full of fabric (polyester, loud) that needed a one-way ticket o-u-t.
One afternoon while Simon was working from home our neighbor took him over to look through the house in case there was anything we might want. The two halves of Simon batted valiantly, and the half that's a sucker for free stuff eventually succumbed to the half that believes that since we're grown-up and living somewhere permanently, we should focus on collecting quality furniture we want, need, and love, and not just furniture that will do for the time being. Thus he came home emptyhanded.
This just happened to be the week before Teddy moved back to town and started looking for a new apartment to fill with furniture (since we'd taken some of his old things when he'd moved away last year and then let the cat destroy them because she is bad and we suck). A week or so later Teddy and his brother pulled up to the house two doors down with a U-haul and carted away a bed, a dresser, an entertainment center, a couple of chairs, and a crazy plaid loveseat (on wheels!)--all of it much better suited to their mid-century retro apartment than to our early-century Craftsman farmhouse.
Although Teddy took all the furniture, Simon and I couldn't stand to walk away from all that free stuff without a few souvenirs from this, the site of our impressive restraint (extra irony, please!), so we gathered a few items, only the most irresistable of sundries--a dozen jazz records, a set of drinking glasses with fish on them, a wooden cane (only mildly haunted, I'm sure), and a shallow champagne glass engraved with the name Wilhemina.
It wasn't until a few weeks later that I found out the dead woman was herself, in fact, Wilhemina. Before I knew that, I could be seen drinking from the glass during our housewarming party, sometimes while telling guests the story of Henry as we stood before his portrait hanging in our hallway. Henry, we discovered, lived in our house until the late 1960s, when he himself died (sad and alone, it turns out, which breaks my heart). Considering that Wilhemina was a centenarian and that her fabric rolls and furniture and orange shag carpet point quite steadily toward the late 1960s themselves, I'm free to wonder at what Henry and Wilhemina's acquaintance might have been--she a jazz-record-listening, psychedelic-jumpsuit-sewing black woman and he a pasty old white guy who studied birds and lived alone. Were they friends? Enemies? Strangers? Did she buy (or take) anything from his estate sale?
I can be excruciatingly sentimental. At another estate sale that same weekend, I had to excuse myself for some fresh air because I'd found an album stuffed with loose photos of soldiers and grandparents and a new baby in the arms of his young mother, and it was making me leak from my ocular sockets. This girl-woman had cat-eye glasses, a polka-dot blouse, a dark pencil skirt, and chunky pumps. "She was probably quite the hipster," Simon said, looking over my shoulder. "At least she would be if she were wearing those clothes now."
While Simon flipped through the other pictures in the stack, I fixated on the Polaroid madonna and child, getting all weepy thinking that someone had left this photo behind, decided it wasn't worth keeping, surrendered it to the estate-sale sharks. Who doesn't keep a photo of a mother and baby, I thought? What kind of family is this? And then before I broke out into full-on sobs, I closed the album, left the room, and spent the next ten minutes spinning for myself a series of convincing scenarios about how that wasn't a mother and her baby at all but a portrait of third cousins who lived on different coasts, never met again, and wouldn't even be able to identify who that was with them in the picture were they shown it today. This is the kind of protective storytelling Simon does when he sees roadkill in the distance: he tells me to look away and then, once we're past the carnage, assures me that it wasn't a smashed kitty-cat at all but an old pair of pants, with a strawberry juicebox leaking from the back pocket. I love it when he lies to me.
I could go on (and I have, in draft mode) but trust me when I say that slogging through my oversized baggage of sentimentality is far less pleasant that this: a pair of pants--brown, with tiger stripes--leaking juicebox gore on the freeway. Have a lovely weekend, and may all your roadkill be lost trousers.
Just go get Krispy Kremes! After all, road kill = K.K. right?
this is why even my cheap ass doesn't go to estate sales. necrophagy.
Oh it's a good thing you went to pick up those glasses at the estate sale because you, my friend, definitely need more glassware. ;-)
I understand what you're feeling re: the oversentimentality. The delightful older gentleman who lived across the streets from my parents died while living with his daughter, while his houed up and lonely. After eight years or so, his relatives decided to sell it, and offered up the contents to my family. While I took some truly beautiful furniture (an intricately carved mahogany table inlaid with leather and a sleek wooden armchair), the thing I treasure most is an undated photograph of the man, his wife, who passed away when I was small, and a number of their friends. After we sorted through the house, the family hired a local Boy Scout troop to clean it out and pile up its contents on the curb. There were stacks and stacks of photo albums out there, in a drizzling rain. I was going to dinner with my parents, and as fate would have it, the photograph fluttered across the road and landed at my feet. I framed it, and it sits on an occasional table in my living room. I felt that some record of his life should be honored, however small.
I would have wept over the mother and baby picture, as well.