Lookie-Loos
I enjoy going to estate sales for several
reasons.
The first is that you never know what
you'll find in what I collectively
call "The American Museums of
Obsessive Consumer Excess".
The second reason is that I'm an avowed
architecture gawker and being allowed
to wander unimpeded through the rooms
and hallways and nooks and crannies
of homes of varying degrees of value,
from suburban starter homes to luxurious
mansions, for free is almost unimaginable
fun. If you're like me you know there's
nothing like the thrill of wandering
into a perfectly-preserved bathroom
circa 1950-ish.
The final reason is that almost every
estate sale offers a mystery and it's
fun to assemble all the pieces that
framed a life and try and imagine who
these people were and what became of
them. Generally the cause of dissolvement
was death or a well-deserved retirement
but on
more than one occasion I've walked
through the door of homes in good neighborhoods
where it looked like the residents
simply vanished, as though they were
whisked away at a moment's notice to
climes unrevealed.
For the past 16 months I've been denied
the pleasure of these suburban safaris,
for obvious pandemic reasons, but I'm
vaccinated now so I'm cautiously reentering
the fray. Yesterday was my first serious
foray into a nearby estate sale. It
was late in the day and the boil of
lookie-loos had reached a simmer so
I felt safe entering the dwelling,
whereupon a mystery stretched itself
out before me.
It was a brick, two-story home in an
upper middle-class neighborhood. It
could have belonged to an accountant
or a mid-level government official
but the contents said "adventurer".
There was no hint of a woman's touch
throughout the house. Scuba equipment,
racks of Air Jordans, motorcycle paraphrenalia
and camping equipment aplenty led me
to believe a middle-aged man, at most,
had met his fate in perhaps a cycling
accident. I heard murmurrings of memorials
for the deceased as I investigated
the dark recesses of boxes brimming
with mysterious bric-a-brac. Once I
returned home a quick Googling revealed
the real story.
The owner, who shall remain unnamed,
was in the sports promotional business
and most of the equipment I saw were
samples. He was newly-divorced and
left behind a six-year-old daughter.
My eyebrows lifted more than slightly
when I read that he was 73 when he
died
of
COVID-19
this
past
January.
Here's to you, you magnificent bastard!
And thanks for the new cycling helmet.
I shall make good use of it.
=Lefty=
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