Open your eyes. Open your eyes and look and you’ll see an army of junk thumpers tromping through garage sales at sunrise; fortune seekers marching through flea markets on rainy afternoons; ‘freegans’ out late sifting through piles of garbage at midnight for that which has cash or life left inside it. If you turn on and tune in you’ll notice whole families salivating in front of high-def screens, scheming as they watch the get-rich-quick antics of American Pickers looking for rare and rusty machines and Pawn Stars cheating desperate gamblers out of the last historical object they own that is worth a car payment or a bag of groceries. There are shrewd little old ladies and enterprising Goth teenagers taking notes on the super charged appraisals they see on Antiques Road Show and men with seats on the stock exchange searching for 40’s era baseball cards and vintage bottle caps on eBay and Craig’s List. Whether it is a down turn in our national fortunes, a need to feel the value of history in our hands, or something more than that, increasingly we have become a people obsessed with the value that can be put on the past. And that means that more and more of us are now on the hunt for our own share of the loot and the history that comes with it.
Me, I joined the hunt a long time ago. I am not poor, nor truly needy, nor ever have I been, but still I plunder and search like a pirate for those things that I can hoard into my own closets or simply admire on the high shelf in my living room - first edition books and classic souvenirs, Japanese china and metal toys, iron tools and art deco kitchen utensils that I might sell in my old age or just hold onto because they secure me in a place and time that is not the place and time I live in now. As a child I walked the streets at dusk on those magic nights before our town collected its bulk trash, pulling out radios I could gut for their speakers and wires and wheeling home boxes of game boards, dice and tokens from which I could salvage an old amusement or piece together a new one. As a man I’ve carried on this addiction from youth to mid-life like an aging junkie looking for a fix among the home owners and peddlers pushing their junk at garage and estate sales. I have risen at 5 a.m. on the first vacation I had in two years to cruise the driveway sales of a beach town and walked away with an antique drill and a one hundred year old leather bound book of poetry worth far beyond the small fan of dollar bills I paid for them. I have slumped at the doorway of an old man’s garage in the sleet of December to find and buy a stainless steel clock made 80 years ago and still humming from the juice of a corroded wall socket. In the last hours of an autumn Sunday afternoon, when misery was upon me with the thought of another work week stretching out in front of me, I have passed a man hauling out the leftovers of his yard sale and - hiding in my car until he disappeared into his house – I have driven away with a trunk full of record albums and old magazines that I gave away to a loved one so that they could find their own pleasure and hope. I have been made happy and whole again with all of these finds, as if the very act of possessing these tokens of the past which I could use or not use, sell, save or simply pass forward, was enough to make me trust that life would go on happily despite all signs to the contrary.
Is this the new American way? You bet it is. In the thousand year old worlds of France and Spain, the ancient cities and towns of China and Germany and Russia, people don’t have to search and haggle for the riches of their past because these artifacts are part of and inside the roads and bridges and buildings and bistros over which they walk and in which they live and work. A man in Paris or a woman in Moscow don’t need to look far and wide for a vintage bicycle, nor do they have to dig into a yard sale to find old china because they ride on and eat off these objects still. In these societies where the past is not easily forgotten, little is cast off and much that has been possessed by your grandparents and parents is possessed by you still. But in America (oh America!) we have made an art of forgetting our past and trashing the things that make us old. Until now. Lately we seem to have been startled awake into realizing that today is no longer a sure thing and tomorrow may never come, but the past will be with us forever. And so our search across lawns and driveways and internet bazaars is growing more intense every day.
And if you believe that I have made this whole thing up for the sake of the poetry, just ask your neighbors; poll your friends and family too. See if they don’t couch a secret and growing desire to find that one old object that will fetch a good price and bring back a curio cabinet full of memories from their childhood or their grandparents or the father they lost a long time ago If they are telling the truth, they will admit that they are searching just like you and I. They will confess that their need to touch and hold these treasures is rising higher and higher - all the way into the bone of the hereafter.
For when we hold in our hand a porcelain bird painted a century ago by a woman in a tenement slum, or a thick obsidian record etched during the depression with the voice of a man singing the blues, or child’s metal bicycle that was fit and finished by Eisenhower era workers who took true American pride in their output, we just somehow know that life will go on without us. This is what all citizens of the world knew eons before America existed and what we American’s just now seem to be understanding for ourselves: our spirits live on in the objects we make long after we are gone. In finding this treasure that is waiting for us among the trash of outbuildings and online auctions and rummage sales at dawn, what we are really looking for is the treasure of everlasting life.
