My friend Patricia and I
love to garage sale. Over the years, we have contentedly pursued the
art of finding treasure amongst piles of other people’s cast offs.
Clearly, treasure is a relative thing. What is wonderful and
beautiful to one person may be totally hideous to another. Just like
art.
One rainy Saturday when
we were nearly finished with our day of lunch and treasure hunting,
Patricia and I stopped at a sale in which objects were strewn all over
the yard and stacked haphazardly in a musty garage. Obviously, other
treasure seekers had been here first.
As Patricia began
hunting in the yard, I wandered into the garage. All day long I had
been looking for a silver frame of a certain size in order to reframe
a picture I had at home. And there it was! Although a bit dusty, it
was a nice satin-brushed frame—the sturdy kind with tiny screws and
pressure tabs used in professional framing. To my eyes, the print was
fairly awful: overly cute, bug-eyed animals drawn in a childlike
setting—but never mind that, it was the frame I was after.
“Are you going to buy
that?” asked a big-eyed girl of about 7 years old, who looked not
unlike some of the animals in the print. Reaching up with her grubby
fingers, she touched the glass over the print. “That’s my very
favorite picture,” she said longingly.
I had to smile. “Why
are you selling it then?” I asked.
“Oh, you know,” she
said with a shrug and pointed to her mother, a stout woman carrying on
negotiations with other treasure hunters.
“Hey!” I said,
suddenly bright with an idea. “I’ll buy the frame. And if you get
me a screwdriver, I’ll open this up and give you the picture before
I go.” With a huge smile at this fortuitous turn of events, she
nodded happily and scrambled off to find a screwdriver.
As she returned, we set to work, only to be interrupted a few
moments later by her mother, running over with a look of severe
concern.
“What are you
doing?” she screeched.
When I explained that I
was going to buy the frame and simply wanted to give the picture to
her daughter, she cut me off. “Oh no, you can’t do that,” she
said. “No, no. If you buy it, you take all of it. We’re going to
get rid of all this junk!”
There are times when you
realize that no amount of explanation or clarification is going to
help, and so you simply give in. With a sigh and a soft, “Sorry
about that”, I smiled at the girl and paid her mother the money.
Patricia and I drove away, though all the way home I wondered what
harm it could possibly do to give the little girl the picture she so
loved.
A few days later, I
finally got around to the reframing job. On a clean kitchen counter, I
took out the frame’s miniature screws, popped out the pressure tabs,
and pulled up the backing. As the girl’s cherished animal picture
fell away from the glass, I was astonished to see another print,
hidden underneath.
With a gasp, I
recognized the work of a famous Alaskan artist! Not only that, the
print was signed and dated—and, owing to its secret home beneath the
other print, was in perfect mint condition.
With a bit of research,
I learned that the value of the print was a significant amount more
than my initial $5 investment. Not only that, it made the story of the
woman and her daughter all the more intriguing. What caused the mother
to want to sell her daughter’s favorite picture in the first place?
What deeper forces caused her to stop me from opening up the frame in
that dingy garage—which most certainly would have exposed the second
print beneath? Was I ‘supposed to’ have that art print? Why are
strangely convoluted stories such as this attached to certain pieces
of art?
Then again, maybe these
are the wrong questions. Maybe we ourselves are the works of art:
fiercely creative individuals acting out our inner dramas, sharing our
stories and sometimes brushing up against the flow of cosmic humor at
just the right time. Maybe the real art is what we make of our life.
One day, one moment, one garage sale at a time.
Dawn
Brunke is the editor of
Alaska Wellness and author of Animal
Voices and Awakening to
Animal Voices. See www.animalvoices.net
for more.
