Downsizing in Widowhood City

Since I started my downsizing project a few of weeks ago I’ve cleaned seven drawers, filled a large trash bag full of shredded papers and listed ten things on e-Bay. It doesn’t sound like a lot but it feels like it was. The sentimental things I brought out to my nieces last week came from three of those drawers and two of the drawers was full of records of e-Bay and antique mall sales---representing so much more than just sales. I couldn’t help getting lost in reading those records here and there and remembering where Don and I was when we found a certain ‘treasure’ we couldn’t pass up. It was Don’s passion. And mine before we met. He got a thrill out of the hunt and every chance we got we were combing estate sales, flea markets, garage sales and antique malls. 

I was the person in charge of cleaning and pricing the collectibles we bought, entering them into our inventory software, keeping our antique booths stocked and tracking sales. Don was the ‘purchasing agent’ and research guy…I’m talking in the days before his stroke. He especially loved traveling across the country to go to 3-4 summer conventions and swap meets each year. And why not. I did all the packing and unpacking for those shows and he was the sales guy who stood in our vendor space swapping stories and selling gas station collectibles---our market niche--to other hardcore gas and oil guys. If you’re wondering if there’s a little resentment in that last sentence, don’t. There’s just no other way to describe the division of labor. Don was a workaholic most of the time and he deserved these unwind and have-fun weekends. He loved it all---the auctions, dinners and show-and-tell events that took place in the evenings after the swap meets closed down for the day. They were high energy where millionaires, museum curators and flea-marketers alike gathered to share a love for the early days when gas stations first spread across America. 

My current e-Bay strategy is simple: list the hardest to pack and ship things first in case I run out of steam before I’m finished. After Don died I spent two years in e-Bay Hell selling off Don’s private collection to the tune of forty thousand dollars, enough to pay off the mortgage. The 3^rdyear I opened another antique booth and hauled lesser stuff to a local auction house. I don’t have much left but I don’t have much energy left either. I literally spent a full morning constructing a box and packing something that is one of only twenty ever made. A royal pain in the butt, but I did it. You can’t donate something like that to Goodwill. Well, you could but how dumb would that be? (I knew a widow who threw out her husband’s entire collection---junk to her---while complaining about not having enough money to live on.) I have, however decided to donate Don’s language disorders machine. I should have done it soon after he died. It was a pricey piece of equipment and it was worth selling back then when the technology was brand new. Now, not so much. Now it represents a problem because I need to take Don’s personal information off the software and so much time has passed since he died that I’ll have to relearn the program to do it. I’m saving that project until winter. Downsizing in Widowhood City is like living your life is in reverse. It’s depressing at times and at other times it’s fun to walk down Memory Lane. 

All of us want to believe we are or was a part of something bigger than ourselves. It’s too late for my husband to be Teddy Roosevelt but Don would have loved to be an outdoor adventurer like Teddy was in his ‘spare time’ and he studied the man’s life like it was a map to the Holy Grail. We had that in common…the love of learning. Don’s passion for gas and oil collecting, for example, led us to learning about the era of wildcat drilling for crude in Texas and Pennsylvania, the lives of the big oil tycoons, the era when gas pumps first populated in front of hardware stores across the nation and the heydays of Route 66. By studying the industry’s history he was able to find a few items that ended up in museums and that’s about as close to being part of something bigger than himself as he ever got. But his love for what he loved was palatable to all who knew him and hopefully that’s the big take-away he passed on to family and friends---that to fully appreciate the present we pay homage to the history makers of bygone eras, and by telling their stories we become the flame tenders on the continuum of time. ©

NOTE: The photo above is a colorized photo of a black and white image taken by Dorothea Lang, a woman who photo-documented the Dust Bowl during the Depression. It was taken in Gordonton, North Carolina in 1939. When we went down to Texas in 1990 we experienced a couple of places like that…where several black men came off a porch to pump gas, check our oil and clean our windows and when it was time to pay, the white guy came down to take our money. We came back from that trip believing that affirmative action laws were still needed in this country.