In the eye of the beholder
Years back, while preparing for a yard sale, one of my items in need of a price tag was a small replica of The Thinker. Except this Thinker appeared to have been in a bar fight. The top and bottom of his jaw were no longer aligned. More accurately, the top and bottom of his entire head was askew, likely the result of a child’s surreptitious repair.
On the table next to the Thinker was an equally useless pair of old, oil-soaked boots.
“I should just throw these both away,” I said to a friend, who was helping me price.
“Leave them,” she said. “You never know what someone will buy.”
I called her crazy for pricing the boots at $2 and the statue at $3, but the day of the sale, they were the first two items to go. The buyer seemed so tickled with her purchase that I just had to ask.
Turns out the boots both looked and smelled like the work boots her late husband had worn. She said she used to complain about them all the time, but that she’d have given anything to be tripping over them on her porch once again. She planned to make the boots into a planter.
And she was apparently buying crooked-jaw Thinker because it amused her. “Doesn’t his expression make you wonder what he just thought?” she asked.
My friend Sue, a fellow yard-sale enthusiast, was recently telling me about a large box of wooden blocks she bought at a Nitro neighborhood sale. The seller had made them himself when his children were small, carefully sanding each block until it was perfectly smooth. From their condition, she could tell they’d been around a long while. The man said his children and grandchildren had put them to use, but there was no one left who wanted them now.
Sue felt a bit uncomfortable buying something she could tell was so special to him, but couldn’t bear that they might go home with someone who didn’t appreciate them. The value of some treasures can’t be measured in dollars.
“I promised him his blocks would be put to good use–that there were two little boys who’d have years of fun playing with them.”
It’s funny the old things we cart home simply because they make us feel good, because the item we’ve bought somehow helps us reattach to a specific time in our past.
Another friend and I were also sharing a laugh about some of the “yard art” we’ve seen for sale, most often displayed around the back of a car pulled off the side of the road.
One recent roadside Charleston vendor was selling Western-themed silhouettes that appeared to be cut from old metal.
“I was sort of laughing to myself,” she said. “Wondering who would buy such a thing when I pulled up in my driveway and answered my own question. Who would buy it? Apparently–me.”
There in her yard was a rough metal cutout of a young girl, with shoulder-length hair, jumping rope.
“I’d bought it because it reminded me of this time when I was a little girl. I’d just gotten my hair cut for maybe the second time or third time ever, and when I saw that jump rope cutout, there was something about it that reminded me of just how good it felt that day, with my fresh hair cut feeling all bouncy. Weird as it sounds, that cutout connects me to that.”
But it didn’t sound weird. It made total sense.
Just like it made sense that a stranger’s old oil-soaked boots could connect to a husband that’s passed.
And that those once-loved blocks could be cherished again.
