On Saturday, Rachelle and I went to an estate sale out in Woodbridge. About 30 minutes outside of Toronto, it’s a suburban community with a large Italian immigrant population. Through leafy streets we passed mansion after mansion. The homes were all brand new and most had the idiosyncratic flair of the owners prominently displayed somewhere in the front yard—a statue of a Roman god, a pair of lions or a saint.
The home where the estate sale was taking place was a 15, 000 square foot palace, one surrounded by a gate that had the family name on it. I’d never been to an estate sale before and I wasn’t sure what to expect, but for some reason I imagined people somberly walking about, quietly looking at furniture and then making a hushed bid to a representative of the estate.
Well, this estate sale was nothing like that.
The place was packed, a frenzy of elbowing, inarticulate greed. Women, as if in a state of competitive panic, tried designer shoes on in the middle of the staircase. A man in a Vince Carter jersey, indifferent, dropped his Tim Horton’s coffee cup in the bathtub before walking out with a scale pressed to his chest. People, focused on whatever treasure they imagined lay just behind the next door, pushed past one another, never pausing to make eye contact or exchange a kind word. It was remorseless, unceasing scavenging.
In the kitchen, all the cupboards had been thrown open, revealing the terrible intimacy of all the medications the couple had been taking before their deaths, but people didn’t seen to care. They plowed indifferent through the home in packs, dropping what they didn’t want without a second thought.
In one of the living rooms, a huge space that looked like it had rarely been lived in, a music box, abandoned, played heartbreakingly from the sofa. A woman with a stack of towels (the one or two she didn’t want she had dropped into the bidet) marched out of the bathroom, looked at a painting of a Flamenco dancer, turned her nose up and then pushed it away.
I wanted to rescue something of the people that had lived there. I wanted to preserve some part of the story of the young man that had emigrated from Italy to Canada, and with his own hands built a successful business from the ground up, and then erected a castle from this success. Maybe his World Cup Italy 94 baseball hat, an item from the room in the basement where the wife had pickled vegetables and hung pasta, or a souvenir ashtray from a favourite vacation resort, but that seemed a little presumptuous.
Everything that was there was being consumed, quickly and without sentiment. It was like one of those wildlife shows in which you see time-lapse photography of nature washing over and devouring a carcass.
And the next day we drove past one of those junky antique stores that line Queen East. Sitting out front were a couple of old guys with bushy, gray beards that kind of looked like civil war soldiers. They were hopefully selling their wares to people passing by, and within their offerings we recognized that two of the displayed items were paintings taken from the foyer of the Woodbridge estate just a few hours earlier.