Sometimes, I go to the secondhand store here in Northern Virginia. It's a big place, rivaling your average department store in size, and housing an amazing amount of unusual and outdated things to look through. Every once in a while, there's some strange computer part or kitchen gadget that I could use. And, the books are reliably quite numerous. Even ignoring that, I'll sometimes spend hours in there, imagining the stories behind some of the things that have found their way here, waiting on a second home.
Sunday was a book day. I'd wandered through the computer parts and the T-shirts and the ancient sporting goods, and had wound up parked at the fiction books somewhere in between the cookbooks, technical manuals, and bodice-rippers that seem to make up the bulk of the thrift-store book market. I had stumbled upon a copy of James Michener's Space, which I remembered having been in my late mom's collection years ago and I wound up caught in a moment of reverie.
After staring a bit dumbly at it for a few seconds, I thumbed through the acknowledgment and read a few paragraphs of the book. I decided that, despite plucking a nostalgic chord in me, I wasn't really interested in the book itself. As I refiled Space (I should really say "reshelved," here... There isn't exactly a Dewey decimal system in the secondhand stacks.), my foot almost knocked over a small canvas somebody had seen fit to just leave leaning against the bottom of the bookshelves.
I picked it up and found it was a child's painting. About the size of a placemat, perhaps twelve inches wide and eighteen inches high. It was bright colors, light blue and light green with reddish spots in the canopy of a rudimentary tree, and orange and gold leaves floating in midair. Some of the leaves were penciled in, unpainted. A big pink paint rectangle had been suspended from the top, left of center on the canvas, with the theme of the painting splotched in black within: "FaLL" I kind of smiled at the primitive effort, and put the painting down (right back on the floor in front of the books, I remembered later) and went to look at the rest of the titles on offer. I got halfway down the row, and was struck by sudden sadness.
I can only imagine "FaLL" is a child's art class assignment, left partly unfinished because time ran out for the artist, as time in class is wont to do. Unfinished or not, it was brought home and presented to her proud mother or father. Maybe it was displayed in the living room or bedroom. It may have even been taken to an office somewhere and had a proud home on work desk for years, not unlike the clay turtle I made in elementary school that spent so many years on the windowsill in my own father's office.
So, how did it wind up here, in a secondhand store? What happened in this family that a product of a child's artistic development wound up in a heap of things that were just discarded like so many outgrown clothes? What happened to the child? Just the idea of its discard made me deeply sad. I actually felt abandoned for the child and for the painting itself.
Discarded once, and then tossed carelessly at the foot of the books in some secondhand store filled with absolute strangers, I could see the remainder of its future in that moment. It would be kicked again and would fall into the path of the hundreds of children that run around this store, and would eventually be broken or ripped underfoot of a child running for the toy aisles. The closing shift would find it, damaged and unsellable, and would relegate it to the trash heap, where it would eventually find its way, under countless other broken, unwanted things, to the landfill. Its last exposure to the light of day would be choked out by the building layers of refuse.
Some day, a year from now (or many), a child, now grown, might have a brief glimmer of memory of handing that painting over to her parents. The memory might give brief pause, but would soon yield to the demands of life, and the last remnant of the child’s effort would be lost forever.
I went back and picked up the canvas. It had been tagged on the reverse as costing just over two dollars. Somebody's child's handiwork, presented in pride and love... two dollars.
It’s hanging over my desk in my Virginia apartment now. I don’t know if it was the best two dollars I ever spent, but giving that child’s effort a little more life definitely helps me sleep a little better.
