"GOING, GOING, GONE . . . : STRANGERS WALK
Published in the Johnson County (Ind.) Daily Journal, Sept. 3, 1998 ©
They begin arriving early, like ants with an open
invitation to a late-afternoon picnic.
They already have to park their cars nearly a block away and walk down
the narrowed street to the driveway of the one-story brick home where household items are lined up along both sides: ladder-back chairs,
cardboard boxes of books with romantic titles and celebrity biographies, a little-used space heater and piles of throw pillows.
People file into the wide garage to sift through boxes of costume jewelry,
old hats, silverware, decorative glass bowls and knick-knacks like fair-weather prospectors. Some peel off through the front door to look at
the empty pieces of furniture with numbered yellow tags taped to them.
These are my mother's belongings to which she no longer belongs. And before the
late afternoon turns into evening and the sun sets behind the town cemetery just two driveways down the street, they will all belong to someone else,
strangers who crowd in around the auctioneer as he pushes himself onto the small temporary platform just inside the opening to the garage, using his
metal cane for support and balance.
The large, jovial man settles into his spot on the platform, his microphone at the
ready, and begins the estate auction. His assistants hand him item after item, a bucket brigade for the things my mother surrounded herself with in the
house where she lived out her last six years of life.
The brick house had been her last refuge, a museum of blue glass and dustless furniture
and soap operas on the big console TV. Most of the things she set out on the tables and shelves remained untouched by anything more than her feather duster,
as she held onto her untouched life until she could hold out no longer.
She would not have been pleased to have this many strangers wandering in and out of her
house, touching her things, crushing cigarette butts out on her rarely used driveway. My mother -- who was never called "Mom," mostly by choice -- liked her distance.
But the auctioneer continues on with his litany of bids and urgent calls for higher numbers.
"And 10, 10, 10, now 15, 15 . . . ," he rattles on good-naturedly but hurriedly.
When he can coax no more nods or spoken bids or secret signals from the members of the
auction crowd, he proclaims, "Sold!" and moves onto the next lot of the landmarks of my mother's life.
Two or three times, he introduces items that he declares are "from the cleanest home
in town." My mother would have appreciated the designation and never argued with its pristine accuracy.
A young couple, the man mustachioed and with a keen eye that takes in all the action, the
woman blonde and more animated with each purchase, bid on a box of women's hats from at least three decades ago. They succeed with a bid of $60, more than
they had been worth to my mother in recent years, and carefully slide the box beside their other purchases at the spot they have staked out in the front yard.
"They ought to be worth something," says the young man, thinking no doubt of the antique
shop he and his wife run in another town about 10 miles away.
Another man, in his late 30s and wearing a blue baseball cap, remains silent until five small
pictures of flowers in vases are offered up by the auctioneer, whose voice continues nonstop like an overnight train. The pictures never looked like anything special,
lining one side of the wall my mother sat in front of while she watched soap operas and Cincinnati Reds baseball games.
The bidding escalates rapidly and amazingly all the way up to $600, but the man in the cap outlasts
the rest of the bidders. He collects the five pictures, which turn out to be some kind of paintings on tiles, Bess Whitridges, pays his money, and walks off with the
only things he has come to come away with, his wife and two young children following behind.
The other items of my mother's life get loaded into the backs of vans and the back seats of cars
parked up and down both sides of the clogged street.
Two men load one of her spotless chests of drawers into a black van, her green lawn buggy already
strapped to its top.
Less than three hours after the beginning, the auctioneer's last "Sold!" is declared. The driveway,
the garage and the inside of the house have been cleaned out more quickly and thoroughly than even my mother could have ever managed herself.
The bits and pieces of her life that never carried much in the way of sentimental value have been sold
off like litters of puppies. The crowd of bidders breaks up, purchases in hand, and scatters in both directions. The sun is little more than a small yellow circle, a child's
ball bouncing off behind the cemetery now.
The pieces of my mother's leftover life disperse, like the winged seeds that flutter down from maple
trees like tiny helicopters every summer. But they are not lost, as they seemed at first to be. They have only blown away in the wind and found new homes, slivers of my
mother's life that are more legacy than loss.
Their new lives overshadow the emptiness of the house left behind, alone and dim, its memory failing
faster than the light.
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Copyright 1998 by Jerry Miller ©
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AWAY WITH REMNANTS OF MOTHER'S LIFE"
