Over the holiday we had occasin to visit an antiques mall to see what presents, if any, we could find. We didn't find any, but Karen found another bulldog figurine that she bought to add to her collection. In fact, we found three such items and Karen chose the one she liked best. It turned out that it has some value well beyond what she paid for it. The woman knows value.
What struck me, however, was the sadness of the antiques mall. This didn't feature furniture so much as it did tchotkes from a bygone era. There were all manner of games and toys from my childhood that, had our Mother not insisted we throw them out, might be worth something today. We saw old beer mugs, dolls of every variety, Christmas ornaments, tools, signs, figurines, books, jewelry -- you name it, we saw it. It was as if we had hit the motherlode of one man's junk being another man's treasure. I looked upon the vast amounts of stuff with awe, thinking that someone had taken the time to collect it all, polish it up and put a value on it, truly believing that someone else might pay good money for much of what was just junk.
To be sure, there were hidden gems within the mountains of detritus that confronted us. But I'm neither interested enough nor inclined to pore over all these things to discern what has value and what's fool's gold. Karen has a much better eye than I do for this stuff. Our plan, at least as far as I was operating was concerned, was for her to tell me what it was she sought and I'd go off and locate it. It was her job to determine whether it was worthy of purchase.
There was one thing, however, on which Karen and I agreed. The saddest thing of all among all this jetsam and flotsam of past lives were the photographs that were for sale. What struck Karen as the saddest were the family photos that were for sale. Decidedly not faceless but almost certainly nameless, these were photographs of real people, probably unwanted by people at estate sales, where no family survived to claim them. The people who had booths at the antique mall recognized that they might have resale value as either stage props or decorations. What struck Karen as saddest is that these people -- long since dead given the apparent age of the photographs themselves -- were once loved by someone and now had their images discarded to be sold to the highest bidder.
The photographs that touched me were of old buildings. Some of the buildings in the photographs no longer exist because they were torn down to make way for improved structures. But like the personal photographs that touched Karen, these photographs had untold stories trapped in them. What things must have gone on in those buildings? What new inventions were created in them? What products were perfected in them? What romances began in them? When they were constructed, what did the workmen do to make them more solid?
We are a notoriously disposable society. Some of it is natural and to be expected. We can't hold on to everything lest we become hoarders. At the same time, there is a natural nostalgia for things from our past. Sometimes, there's even a nostalgia for things from other people's pasts because it either reminds us of our own or because we feel a kinship with the people whose lives are represented in those photographs.
It's also sad, I think, because we fear that in years to come, photographs of our lives may be found in these antique malls. What will the people think as they look down on our questionable attire? Will they feel the same sadness for us that we feel for people born more than one hundred years ago? Or will they simply see a capitalist opportunity in our mortality?
(c) 2012 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
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