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Pieces of a Dream
Jul. 8th, 2011 07:08 amIf there's one thing sadder than watching somebody's life being picked over at an estate sale, it's watching the rejected remnants of that life being re-picked over on the first garbage night after the estate sale.
Eleanor and I both wrote about the two-day extravaganza last Friday and Saturday where our longtime neighbor's treasure got plundered for cash. (I'd seen another of the peach pleather pieces being carried out after reading what she wrote about having seen an earlier sale of a bench in that style. I feigned tears and said, "I can't believe they let them break up the set!") You just knew, though, that there would be unsold stuff, and early yesterday afternoon, the workers arrived to kick it all to the curb. Close to a dozen pieces of furniture, and even more dozens of pieces of a life once lived there, left out for anyone to claim.
And boy did they. The cars and trucks and unmarked vans began coming by, first slowing for a preview, then returning to cart their preciouses off to a new place (or, in the case of the dinette set that Emily rejected for even a college apartment, probably melted down for scrap metal). A couple of college-age girls struggled to fit a huge dresser into a car not much bigger than Em's Chevy Cavalier. By this morning, it was pretty much down to hunks of wood and garbage bags.
But at one point last night, while putting our own cans and blue boxes out, I couldn't resist a peek, so I went over to look through a higgledy-piggledy pile of stuff left between the Hefty bags and the heftier unsold furniture items. It was a potpourri of a life once lived there. Framed family pictures from probably the 50s (we'd heard the "sale" included quite a few picture frames with the department-store faux photos still in them, but these were much older shots of people from a much older era, sitting at a table and smiling for the Brownie Hawkeye). Next to those was the one treasure I couldn't resist: a book (surprise surprise), meant to be written in, on 11 x 14 pages, "Property Air Force, U.S. Army" stamped on the inside cover, with A-to-Z tabs down the side of the sections (the A through D tabs are missing, probably removed by Air Force censors before they got the book). On the first page is written:
Record of Vinnie and Frank [their last name]
15 (the original name of our street, which we saw on our survey)
Building schedule
Flip the page and you see
Excavation began March 19, 1958
Completed digging cellar
And that's as far as they got. Twenty-two lettered tabs, followed by 100 numbered blank pages. Nothing else in it or on it but mildew, and left for the picking.
I might give it to Emily to use as a weird retro sketchbook. Or start my next novel in it. More likely, though, I'll forget about it, and someday it will, once again, be kicked to the curb.
Eleanor and I both wrote about the two-day extravaganza last Friday and Saturday where our longtime neighbor's treasure got plundered for cash. (I'd seen another of the peach pleather pieces being carried out after reading what she wrote about having seen an earlier sale of a bench in that style. I feigned tears and said, "I can't believe they let them break up the set!") You just knew, though, that there would be unsold stuff, and early yesterday afternoon, the workers arrived to kick it all to the curb. Close to a dozen pieces of furniture, and even more dozens of pieces of a life once lived there, left out for anyone to claim.
And boy did they. The cars and trucks and unmarked vans began coming by, first slowing for a preview, then returning to cart their preciouses off to a new place (or, in the case of the dinette set that Emily rejected for even a college apartment, probably melted down for scrap metal). A couple of college-age girls struggled to fit a huge dresser into a car not much bigger than Em's Chevy Cavalier. By this morning, it was pretty much down to hunks of wood and garbage bags.
But at one point last night, while putting our own cans and blue boxes out, I couldn't resist a peek, so I went over to look through a higgledy-piggledy pile of stuff left between the Hefty bags and the heftier unsold furniture items. It was a potpourri of a life once lived there. Framed family pictures from probably the 50s (we'd heard the "sale" included quite a few picture frames with the department-store faux photos still in them, but these were much older shots of people from a much older era, sitting at a table and smiling for the Brownie Hawkeye). Next to those was the one treasure I couldn't resist: a book (surprise surprise), meant to be written in, on 11 x 14 pages, "Property Air Force, U.S. Army" stamped on the inside cover, with A-to-Z tabs down the side of the sections (the A through D tabs are missing, probably removed by Air Force censors before they got the book). On the first page is written:
Record of Vinnie and Frank [their last name]
15 (the original name of our street, which we saw on our survey)
Building schedule
Flip the page and you see
Excavation began March 19, 1958
Completed digging cellar
And that's as far as they got. Twenty-two lettered tabs, followed by 100 numbered blank pages. Nothing else in it or on it but mildew, and left for the picking.
I might give it to Emily to use as a weird retro sketchbook. Or start my next novel in it. More likely, though, I'll forget about it, and someday it will, once again, be kicked to the curb.