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Estate Auctions and Old People
My grandma has had this bed in her new apartment for years and never used it. She sleeps upright in her armchair every night. As part of my commitment to acting like a retiree at the ripe age of 20, I spend a lot of my time, and money, bidding on online estate auctions. There’s this network for the whole county that liquidates entire homes, selling everything at a base price of 5 bucks. I started doing this when the utter lack of decent antique stores in my area began to get to me. There’s some quality finds to be had, especially when you only want things no one else cares about.
I picked up some odds and ends before getting my hands on my first true prize: a 1952 Smith-Corona typewriter. I got it for a measly 20 dollars, and when I took it home it surprisingly worked. Not well, mind you, but if I slammed on the keys hard enough, I could get a poem or two out of it.
To pick up your hard won items you have to go to the estates themselves. The organizer checks your invoice and then walks you though the house to wherever your items are being kept.
Often these houses are gutted. The one I went to today was a beauty of a mid-century modern beach house. It had half the ceiling in the kitchen ripped out and all of the doors were gone, letting the interior open up onto itself. The day I went to pick up the typewriter, I passed by an old woman who didn’t seem to be a buyer, but who also stood apart from the people running the auction. I was wearing my green dress that day and had on long plastic fingernails. As I lugged the typewriter out of the house by its carrying case I noticed the woman watching me.
The typewriter, in all her glory. In many cases, it’s clear that the owners of the house had died. These are often the auctions with the most to sell. Everything is put up for bidding. Plates, Christmas decorations, whole crates of costume jewelry, pill boxes. Things the living would’t leave behind. In one of the upcoming auctions that I’m hoping to win a film projector from, a walker and a set of crutches were up for sale. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to figure out what had to occur for someone to suddenly no longer need a walker. Either a Christ-like miracle happened or there simply isn’t anyone left to use it anymore. And I don’t believe in Christ. Or miracles. Or walkers.
Sometimes, though, the auction lists are more sparse, like with the case of the typewriter. Valuables and collectables, an entire life’s worth of memories and passions, yes, but not the necessities.
When that woman watched me walk out of that house with the typewriter, I wondered if she was its owner. The thing came with the original receipt form 1953 inside the case, bought from a stationary store right there in town. I wonder if she resented me in that moment, if she resented everything that led to her having so little control over a lifetime of accumulation. I felt a little bit like I was stealing something from her. Perhaps I am projecting my own possessiveness over my things.
Either way, I spend a lot of my time sifting through the possessions of dead people, me and the other vultures in the estate sale racket. This is the only time when I feel any sort of empathy towards old people.
In general, I find the elderly to be the worst kinds of person. Inflexible in their intelligence, unaccustomed in their social performance. It is such a shame then, that I participate in just so many old people activities. I went to go see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof earlier this evening at the theater downtown, and, like always, I was the only person under retirement age in attendance.
There is just something so grating about the way old people croon and chatter and talk at full volume when they think they’re whispering because their hearing has gone. That theater of geriatrics laughed through the entire movie. I don’t know if I’m losing it or what, but Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is NOT a goddamned comedy. Any time the dad character was emotionally abusive to his wive they laughed like it was the funniest thing they had ever heard.
There was one couple the row in front of me that laughed the loudest, a man and a woman. Someone in the movie would tell his wife to shut up, or imply he never wanted to marry her, and the two of them would crack up every time, the man most of all. I wondered then, does this woman think that if she laughs along with him, that she’ll somehow be saved from it herself? It made me think about my mom.
I couldn’t enjoy the movie after that and left 20 minutes early.
by Desdemona | July 13, 2024
The Inescapable Desolation of Dallas, Texas
I grew up in one of the old neighborhoods. Semi-old, I suppose. The whole place went up some time in the late 50s. My parents moved in right at the turn of the century. Gen-Xers of the new millennium, Y2K darlings and law firm rookies. They moved to a house in anticipation of a child, not quite a daughter yet. They bought it from some old couple, most of the couples in my neighborhood were old. They would continue to remain old up until I started high school, when they all started dying, and the twenty-something nouveau riche couples took their place.
My dad grew up somewhere similar. His childhood was spent in an expanding development in West Dallas. When my parents were choosing which neighborhood to start a family in, they say, they narrowed it down to either my dad’s old stomping ground, or the old growth streets of North Dallas. They chose based on the local elementary school’s sterling reputation (a fact I find absurd considering I spent seven years at that school and underperformed due to “lack of challenge,” according to the school’s counselor).
That neighborhood where my grandma still lives, in the same house she had since the 60s, is now overrun with neglect. Derelict Krogers and bureaucratic apathy (See “Hoarder” in the Stories tab).
Dallas doesn’t have much that it holds claim to. And the only time I’ve ever really thought about it is when I moved to California. Never have I felt more like a Texan than when I left it.
Leaving Dallas is strange. I can’t say in the past that I ever had very strong feelings about the city. It certainly has its merits in a far removed sort of way. There are skyscrapers and shops and parks and more restaurants than were ever necessary. And I lived there. So, if anything, it had me.
Leaving Dallas is strange because it didn’t really feel like leaving, which I suppose in a way it isn’t. I’ll be back every break and every summer after that. The leaving doesn’t feel permanent. The leaving is the same as it’s always been.
Dallas is not a place of many happy returns. It’s a place of layover flights and business conventions. It has a grayness to it, even beyond its literal aesthetics. Yes, most of Downtown is made up of very practical concrete boxes that create heat blooms and homelessness, but its grayness infests its people too. Ambition and artistic intent are absent. Even Deep Ellum, the artsy, historical, and exceedingly “local” neighborhood near the city center has a certain vapidity to its charm, a corporate flair to both its sculptures and gun violence.
I don’t think I’ll ever move back to Dallas. If I do, I suspect something will have gone terribly wrong. It feels strange to even consider, because I think I’ve always been leaving Dallas, in small ways.
Either way, I’m in California now, but I don’t think I will be forever. I’m already leaving here too, though it may take some years to get there.
by Desdemona | July 12, 2024
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Introduction to Nostalgia
I think a lot about the past. Not my own, god no. There is nothing more detestable that self-reflection, and nothing more admirable than the blind courage it takes to walk out of the house with zero understanding of who you are. I think a lot about the past that I’ll never get to experience. My apartment is full of outdated technology and dust collecting trinkets.
I have a Norman Rockwell radio that’s made to look older than it is. It has a cassette player on the side. I have a portable TV from the mid-90s who’s radio setting picks up venom-tongued audio-preachers at one in the morning, the only time I turn it on. The TV setting can’t pick up any of the modern channels, each turn of the dial reveals a different layout of fissuring digital snow. I have a green banker’s lamp I got from an estate auction. It has a small triangle shaped crack in the glass, about a centimeter wide. It makes a corner of my living room glow green at night.
When I think about the past, I do so in the way a small child spoiled by its parents thinks about the toy another child at daycare won’t let them play with. It’s understandably sad, I suppose. We mourn things that are impossible. It is functionally impossible for me to experience any of the times that I use to decorate my life. And as I’ve grown older, now a 20-something with more pride than sense, and even less friends, I’ve found myself becoming more and more given to nostalgia. Although, it’s not nearly proportional to my age. I experience nostalgia like an old war hero or lounge singer at the end of their life. Growing up my mom always called me an “old jazz man” living in a girl’s body. What she thought was a girl’s body.
Nostalgia is frustrating because there’s nothing you can do about it. It doesn’t exist out there, in the real world, with attached actions and people and things. It sits in your chest and nowhere else. It makes you live each moment from the perspective of yourself twenty years down the road, already nostalgic for things that haven’t really happened. Why have I become my own voyeur?
by Desdemona | July 11, 2024
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