On Sunday, Rachelle and I went to the St. Lawrence Market with a friend in order to attend the weekly antique bazaar. Like most such enterprises, it’s primarily a wasteland of junk. The vendors bear more resemblance to carnies at the Ex than they do Southern gentlemen with ascots and European educations.
As I’m pretty unsophisticated, I’m always drawn to kitsch. Yesterday there were a variety of items in my price range—a handful of pins with 1980’s baseball stars on them, weird fake-retro porn postcards, an etching of a creepy dog and a Carry-All Fighting Knight Action Play Set.
This last item was buried beneath a box of cassettes, and when I lifted them off, the play set was instantly recognizable as the one my parents gave me for Christmas when I was about six years old. It was a thin metal box, with a handle, that was designed to look like a suitcase. When you opened it, it unfolded into the interior of castle, replete with cobbled floors. There were plastic turrets that you arrayed on the walls of the castle, a drawbridge that came down, and an army of plastic sliver knights and plastic green Vikings. The Vikings had a battering ram and a catapult, which actually launched little plastic pellets, while the knights had, well, the castle.
The set was full of chocking hazards, eye gauge threats and sharp, jagged edges that were guaranteed to slice open a six year-old boy and give him tetanus, but it was, without a doubt, the best gift ever.
When I came across the set at the antique market I gasped, pointing at it while stammering, “I used to have this when I was a boy!!” at the entirely uninterested vendor, who just stood there with her hands in her pockets, repeating, as if autistic, “70 dollar, 70 dollar.” The set she was selling was entirely corroded and wouldn’t open or shut properly and when I looked inside, it was crappy, broken and entirely incomplete, far from the grandeur I remembered as a boy. No matter, stumbling upon it like that was truly a beautiful gift, allowing me, for a couple of minutes to travel in time so vividly, that I could even smell the Christmas dinner my parents were cooking.