On Sunday, as we often do, Rachelle and I went to the St. Lawrence antique market.
Unshaven vendors wearing baseball caps of teams long since extinct, slumped in their chairs, as if having given up on the hang-over they were earlier trying to shake. Partially concealed beneath the tables where they displayed their wares, they ate French fries or worked on crossword puzzles, barely attempting looks of hopefulness when customers passed them by.
Mostly they talked to one another.
“I could never go to a fat dentist. I know it’s not nice to say, but it really makes a difference to see somebody that’s thin and health conscious walk through that door. I mean, I don’t want some fat slob who doesn’t look after himself sticking his hands in my mouth. Just the way I am. “
At another table:
“I’m not going to do it. I don’t want to be hurt again. It won’t be like the last time, it won’t ever be like the last time, I’ll tell you that much. I said–No, I’m not angry at you, I’m just disappointed. Again– And then I hung-up on him.”
Seeing me looking at a lamp on her table, she looked away from the person she had been speaking with, “It’s a beauty, isn’t it?” she said to me,” I’ll give it to you for $25,” a little bit of light now coming into her eyes.
At another stall, I was going through a box of buttons and was paying special attention to a few I had found. They were from 1958, and belonged to members of the Ft. Nelson, B.C. curling club. On each one, a name had been written:
J. Hardwick
G.Hardwick
The vendor, a man near 60, seeing me trying to think my way through the story of these pins, began to talk.
“Those pins belonged to my parents. My dad worked at the military base there back in the 50’s. Do you know where Fort Nelson is? The very northeastern corner of British Columia. It’s practically Alaska, Hell, it’s practically the Arctic. This was back before the Trans-Canada highway was built, and the highway we used was covered in gravel the size of five-pin bowling balls. You had to wrap your gas tank in foam to protect it, and you had to cover all of your lights in chicken wire, because if one of them broke, you were done for. You couldn’t see a thing, and there wasn’t nobody who was coming to get you if you ran into trouble.” I nodded my head as he spoke.
“When I was a boy, the city siren would go off whenever a pack of wolves were passing through town so that all the school children would know to stay inside.”
He paused for a moment, “You know, I don’t think that I’m going to sell those buttons after all.”
And then he sat down, looking at his parent’s old pins that he now held in his hands.