I went to a thrift store in
Abbott Kinney the other day. It was a pretty standard thrift store: second hand ties, some with stains, used jewelry with missing stones, dusty clothes hanging on wire hangers, items for [re]sale stuffed into every possible corner of the small space, eventually overflowing onto the sidewalk. I came upon a large fruit bowl with photographs. I asked the proprietor about these and he told me that many times they get photo albums from people with the photos still in them. They got so many that they decided to start selling them. I was fascinated by these pictures. They were as pictures are: capturing a very specific moment of someone's life and freezing it in time. Only these were abandoned or lost.
I kept coming across photos of one particular woman. She had pale, fair skin and red, curly, shoulder-length hair. Seventy percent of the pictures I looked at were of her. It was clear that she had traveled the world. There were pictures of her in China, of her in India, in front of the Taj Mahal, in a jungle locale standing outside of a straw and mud hut, of her in the pilot's seat of a small plane, of her in the desert standing next to a camel. The photos spanned twenty years of her life. She was about forty years old in the earlier ones and and in her sixties in the later ones. In essence, I saw an extended snapshot of this woman's life. She had seen many things. She knew how to fly a plane. There was a male companion in some of the pictures. I began wondering why so many of this woman's memories were here. Discarded. Left to be rummaged through by strangers. I found out that these albums were bought from an estate sale when she had died. The store had acquired six albums. Her children did not want any of the photos because they were of her life with her new husband. A man that was not their father. A man that they did not approve of. I felt very sad. It was not proper that so many of this woman's memories were here. In a dusty, crowded thrift store instead of with someone who knew her and cared for her. Someone who appreciated and admired her journeys. But then maybe they were in the right place after all. Because in looking through her images I, as a stranger, felt some of all of those things for her: admiration, respect, knowledge of her life, appreciation, and concern.
