Katie Haegele - White Elephants: On Yard Sales, Relationships, & Finding Out What Was Missing

White Elephants

O N Y ARD SALES, RELATIONSHIPS, AND FINDING WHAT WAS MISSING

Katie Haegele

Released June 1, 2012

First printing

ISBN 978-1-934620-28-1

This is Microcosm #76105

Illustrated by Helen Entwisle

Fonts by Ian Lynam

Edited by Joe Biel and Adam Gnade

Designed by Joe Biel

Distributed by IPG and Turnaround, UK

Microcosm Publishing

112C S. Main St.

Lansing, KS 66043-1501

&

636 SE 11th Ave.

Portland, OR 97214

www.microcosmpublishing.com

Guideposts
Yard Sale Season No. 1

I Love You, Secondhand Junk
Yard Sale Season No. 2

Indecent, Dowdy, Hideous,
Quaint:
Yard Sale Season No. 3

The Physics of See-Saws
Yard Sale Season No. 4

I GREW UP IN AN OLD TOWN THAT LIES RIGHT ON the city limit of Philadelphia. I live here still. In fact I live around the corner and up the street from the house I grew up in, which is where my mother still lives. She and I talk every day and see each other almost as often, and Id like to say that I probably wouldnt live here, and we probably wouldnt be as close as we are, if my father hadnt died 12 years ago when I was 21. Id like to say this because I think it must be true, but I try not to think about what-ifs where his life is concerned. They dont make any difference; they dont even make sense. That was what happened, not something different, and here I am, standing in the middle of my life.

And good things have come out of the sadness, as they always do. Making friends with my mom has been one of the good things. We always got along okay, but we only got close after my dad died and I was living at home again with her, just the two of us. A few days after his funeral I left the apartment Id shared with a friend and limped back home, me and the narrow-bodied cat Id adopted that spring. I stayed there for five years. It wasnt always easy, for me or for Mom. Sometimes I came home late, fumbling at the front door, drunk, waking her up and annoying her. Other times I annoyed her by leaving every mug in my messy bedroom, half-filled with cold milky tea, teetering all around the room. But there were many nights we sat in the living room, ignoring the TV and talking all evening. On Halloween, if the weather was mild, wed sit on the porch to give out candy, whispering about all our neighbors. Once a week we had dinner at this pubby restaurant we used to like, before it turned into a sports bar. Id have a beer and Mom would have a glass of white wine, and wed tease the waiter by calling him The Genius because he always remembered our drink order, which was always the same.

This rummaging pastime, though, this was something I had to work at. Rooting through other peoples old stuff has been one of my favorite things to do since I was in high school, but not my moms. She didnt get it. When I was 15 and having a best-friend love-affair with Laura R., she and I used to go to the Salvation Army and bring back wonderful clothest-shirts with goofy ads for local businesses, tight seventies leather jackets in weird colors, and one time, an amazing chintzy black polyester waitress uniform, the kind thats all one piece and has white collars and cuffs. Back then, my mother made me put that stuff through the laundry separate from everything else, she was so skeeved out by it. But once I was living there again as a grownup I guess she decided to get over it. One Saturday I talked her into doing the yard sale circuit with me and she didnt seem to hate it, so I kept circling the ads in the classifieds every week, hoping shed want to go again. I didnt have a drivers licensestill dontso I knew if I could get Mom into the rummaging game we could go all over the place, and we did. Still do.

Every Wednesday the local newspaper would come and wed go through the classifieds looking for yard sales. Over time weve learned to assess a listings potential with real accuracy. If it says NO EARLY BIRDS it will probably have cheesy stuff we dont want, like Beanie Babies and other dubious collectibles. Things called estate sales are more promising but theyre often overpriced. There was one address we kept seeing in the classifieds and eventually came to recognize as the home of an antiques dealer. Technically it was a yard salefor sure, it was held right there in the ladys weedy little yard. But looking through her stuff felt more like visiting an antiques store. She had boxes of hundred-year-old postcards, terrifying farm tools, dressmakers dummies, things like that. I love those too, but not at a yard sale. People of the neighborhood, give me your scuffed jewelry, your chipped serving bowls, your National Geographics! I want to do the digging for my buried treasures, not have it done for me.

When I moved away from home for the second time, it was into an apartment in a pretty little brick building around the corner, the one I used to walk past every day on my way to school. Mom and I kept our Saturday rummage date, and at some point it occurred to me that recording these yard sale moments might be fun or funny or even worthwhile. I was deeply into making zines by that point and the obsessive format seemed perfect for a project like this. Sure enough, I made that first issue of White Elephants and have done so every summer since. Its become an important part of the yard sale process: Sit on my couch and circle the likely-looking ads, drinking my coffee and waiting for Mom to come pick me up. Look out the window of the passenger side of her car, watching the suburbs slide past. Paw through other peoples old junk like Im looking for something, because lets be honest, I am. Come home and write up a report, like a private eye.

At this point most of the stuff I own used to belong to somebody else. Ive bought hand towels with owls on them, a wicker basket shaped like a chicken, and a yellow wire sculpture of a chicken with its middle hollowed out like a basket, which must have some intended use but I dont know what it is. One morning, on a card table on a ladys front lawn, I found an ugly decorative plate with too many flowers on it that says, in curlicue cursive, N EVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF A WOMAN , and now it hangs on the wall over my kitchen sink. I wont even tell you about the actual trash Ive salvaged, the family photographs and driving school certificates Ive picked out of peoples garbage cans or the slightly more useful furniture and books Ive found, discarded, on the curb. I will say that I love all the things Ive found, completely and without irony. Well, the Power of a Woman plate is about fifty-percent ironic, I guess. But Im not sure if ironic is the right word. It sounds so calculated, and kind of mean-spirited. The feeling I get from kitsch is more touching than that, more sad. A thing becomes kitschy once it is no longer fabulous, but is haunted by the ghost of its former fabulousness. Thats how kitsch works. Its going but its not gone yet.

A few years ago this girl I know through doing zines told me she was planning to start a distro and call it Saudade. I wished her luck and asked her: What does the name mean? She told me its a Portuguese word that doesnt translate too neatly into English, but that it means nostalgia, kind of, a sense of longing for something that is lost and probably cant be found again. Well hey, I thought. I know that feeling. By coincidence that same week I was in one of the small libraries in my neighborhood, looking for something to read, when I found a book about the city of Trieste by the Welsh travel writer Jan Morris. I sat on the floor to look through it a bit, even though Id never heard of Trieste and didnt know where it was. (Its in Italy.) Right on the second page the writer mentioned a word of Welsh Gaelic: hiraeth. It means a kind of nostalgic sadness, though supposedly it too has no translation into English. As far as I can tell it means homesickness but for an idealized home, someplace that never existed but in a perfect world would materialize and welcome you to it. It would be neat, tidy I mean, to say that Ive been looking for a sense of home ever since I lost my dad, and that might be a part of it, but its not the whole story. The feeling that nudges me toward these secondhand things is something thats been with me for a long time.