I majored in English Literature and got a MFA in poetry writing. After being tossed and turned in the world of employment like a tee shirt in a dryer, I finally settled on antiques and vintage clothing as a career and found, if not riches, a niche of sorts for myself and my romantic tendencies. And I mean romantic in the literary sense-the windswept moor, the heroine in the long white gown running from the forboding mansion into the arms of the circumspect yet secretly aristocratic fisherman who lives in the gatekeeper's mansion. Working with the artifacts of a vanished time appeals to me simply because I wished I lived in that vanished time and had the use of these artifacts when they were new.
Last Wednesday at the country auction on the Eastern Shore that I attend every week, my romantic hunger was satisfied by a cardboard box of impossibly dainty parasols, most made of tissue thin silk and festooned with lace with carved ivory handles and fluttering, decayed pink ribbon rosettes. Sadly ,the parasols sold to a grim faced middle aged man who bought them for $110.00. Still, the thought of twirling one while being rowed down a flower choked river by my suitor was planted in my head. Perhaps I would even eat strawberries, like Tess of the D'Urbervilles did in the 80's movie starring Nastassia Kinski.
My subject for this blog entry however is not the parasols, the bravely surviving white cotton muslin gowns worn by some high school graduate in 1910 or even the sterling silver compact from 1915 with the rouge still in it. These items had buyers. They did not suffer the fate of some of the finest masterpieces of world literature which were discarded from the auction lots as having no resale value and literally stepped on by hard as nails antique dealers on their way to their next cash cow. "Moby Dick", "Hamlet", "Remembrance of Things Past", "Jane Eyre"--the list goes on of classic books that I have salvaged from the mud at this auction and brought home and read. That means I have an eclectic and wide ranging library of the best that was ever thought or written for absoloutely no cost. Last week one of my favorite books "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte was being punted around like a soccer ball. I dove in and removed it and it rests on my night stand, ready to be reread for the fifth time. It is also heavily annotated by the student who studied it in highschool.
Letters, diaries and personal snap shots are also discarded and I have stacks of them at home. One diary gave me a detailed account of the weather for each day of 1947, written by a sad older lady who lived with her recently divorced daughter and her granddaughter. Entries like "Mary came in this morning at 4:30 and then got up to have breakfast with George" don't exactly spell out what happened, but you can read between the lines.
So, besides getting free literature I also get glimpses into the everyday ordinary lives of people from the past- their Christmas snapshots, their wedding photos, their baby pictures, their prom photos. I don't know who they were (or are) but I feel that I have salvaged a bit of their lives that may otherwise go in the shredder or be pushed up by the backhoe that the auction people use to clean up the field after the auction is over. The antiques profession teaches us that nothing lasts forever- the possessions that we work so hard to buy end their lives being sifted through by strangers assessing their resale value (the scene in "A Christmas Carol" comes to mind when the junk sellers are arguing over the recently deceased Scrooge's bedlinens). When it comes down to it it is experience not possessions that really matters- so that leaves my job of experience with long gone people's possessions somewhat of a contradiction. Perhaps I should write a poem about it, though I am fully aware that this poem would not be salvaged from the dirt at the auction by someone like me in the future.
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