I go to estate sales. Have for years. There’s something about them I can’t quite explain and have mostly stopped trying to. Old stuff just does something for me. Always has. Maybe that’s why I bought a building from 1918. I don’t know. Maybe I have a problem.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Especially these last several months, standing in a gutted building on Meadows Street trying to remember why I thought this was a good idea.
A few years back I drove out of town for one. South Georgia. A man had died — of old age, I assume — and his neighbor was selling off what he left behind. I never knew him. Never would. But you can learn a lot about a person from what they leave behind. More, maybe, than you’d learn from a conversation.
I bought a box of old Super 8 film reels and a stack of photo negatives. Decades old. I followed this man through what I’m pretty sure were the Swiss Alps — him with a pack on his back, shooting on film, because what other options were there. He seemed like someone who moved toward things rather than away from them. Someone who went looking. The kind of person who thought the world was worth documenting.
I also found several dozen P38s from K-rations. Vietnam era. Still in their paper sleeves. If you don’t know what a P38 is, it’s a can opener. Tiny. Folding. Issued to soldiers with their field rations and more or less the single greatest invention the United States military ever produced. I put one on my keychain. Still there.
An old oil can. Fly fishing gear. A life, basically, reduced to a Saturday morning and whatever someone was willing to pay for it.
Of everything I walked out with, only one thing told me his name.
A Stanley thermos. Original. From the 1970s. Still in the box, accessories still in the plastic — the kind of thing you buy and take care of and fully intend to use and somehow never do. And carved into the bottom of it, a name.
Murphy.
I still have it. I use it.
Time moves fast and it forgets faster. That seems to be the agreement we’ve all made without quite signing anything. Progress means forward. Forward means away. Away from the things that took longer, cost more, required more of you. The relationships you had to tend. The letters you wrote out by hand. The places you went to without knowing exactly what you’d find there.
I’m not interested in living in the past. I don’t think that’s actually possible, and I’m not sure it would be good for you if it were. But I am interested in the nod. The acknowledgment. The moment where you stop long enough to recognize what something was before you decide what comes next.
Parlor has always tried to operate that way. We chase the new thing. We have to — it’s the job and it’s what keeps the lights on. But not without looking back first. Not without understanding that the tools change and the instincts don’t. That wondering and wandering and sitting across a table from someone and figuring something out together — that stuff doesn’t expire.
I don’t know Murphy’s last name. I don’t know much of anything about him, really. But I know he went to the Alps with a pack and a camera. I know he kept his can opener. I know someone, somewhere, thought enough of him to carve his name into the bottom of something before they gave it to him.
That feels like enough.
There’s a building on East Meadows Street that’s been standing since 1918. Most people walked past it. A few walked through it and walked back out. It has bad bones and good light and more history than anyone left alive could probably account for. I don’t know every story those walls held. I’m not sure I need to.
I just know I recognized something in it.
Maybe that’s what staying looks like before it happens. Not a decision, exactly. More like a moment of paying attention long enough to see the thing clearly.
There are things that stay. Not everything, but some things. The trick, I think, is paying attention to which ones.
More soon.