St. Vincent de Paul
I went to St. Vincent De Paul today looking for the proverbial "treasures" amongst the detritus of lives pared down, of lives ending, of lives changing. I found some cool items there, but the hunt left me with a heavy mantle of thoughts as well as a slight sheen of dust under my skin. Thrifting is not something I learned from my cool friends, I didn't join the thrift revolution because I have a desire to find the next Rembrandt in the stacks of sad seventies framed amateur self portraits. I learned to thrift shop at my mother's side.
She lived in a commune when she started having her babies and she dressed us in clothes handed down by others in the commune as well as clothes bought at thrift stores in
Even after we had more money and my parents started taking us shopping for new clothes at the beginning of every school year, we still frequented garage sales and the thrift stores. Sometimes it was really fun, like when my mom took us shopping for things to use for our Halloween costumes. Other times it was painful, like the time I took a tap dance class and wanted so bad to have real tap shoes and my mom took me to the Good Will to look for shoes we could put taps on. I actually found a pair of mary janes that looked alright, but they never fit well and I'm pretty sure that's why I'm not a famous tap star today.
After a period of rebellion against used clothes I rediscovered thrift shopping, oddly enough it was once again because of my mom. When I turned fourteen, after a somewhat painful effort to appear as a preppy kid (doomed to failure because I'm not and never was a preppy person) I gave up trying to impress my haughty class-mates with my ability to be exactly like their own sad excuse for coolness and struck out on my own. Sartorially speaking. I went to used clothing stores where you could buy a pair of nineteen forties velvet shoes for three dollars. I dressed myself as I pleased from army and band jackets bought at the Good Will. My mom inspired me by her own small collection of really cool vintage clothes. Once I showed everyone in my school how much I couldn't care less what they thought of me, and started finding my own dress code, I became a whole hell of a lot more popular. Sure, I was still an outcast, just a popular one. (I did get spit at and had bottles thrown at me, but that's another story.)
For many many years I found most of my furniture and clothes at thrift shops. I didn't shop there because I couldn't afford to shop anywhere else, though often that was the case, I did it because I had always done it. I didn't go there for the thrill of the hunt. I went there to find practical things I needed and sometimes found amazing unexpected finds. The bicycle I have been riding for ten years came from the Petaluma Good Will. But over the years something shifted. The experience started opening a window into a world I can't look at for long periods of time. Maybe because I've been too close to those worlds. I started to see, I mean to really see the other people shopping at the thrift stores. The people who worked in them were the same.
I began to feel a kind of oppression touching all the objects that had been donated as is. With all the grime and dust on them that whoever last had them let accumulate before shedding the item, before casting it off like old skin. I felt such a deadening of spirit seeing how many people who shopped and worked there had half as many teeth left in their mouths than myself, people who were around my age, with black holes in their head. Maybe it's important to know that I hear things in the world and see things that other people don't. Mental illness of the kind that I have has a way of amplifying life by a hundred decibels. You think I don't know when you're sad? I usually do. You think I can't tell when you're holding in your exciting secrets? I may not know what they are, but I know when you're bursting with something. I have the sensitivity of an acutely aware wild animal, or of a child before he learns to articulate and then deny the things he sees and knows. When people out in the world feel pain, when they are bleeding to death alone in their cluttered apartments, I hear them. Most of you don't, but I do. Do you think I'm crazy? Well shit, that's what I'm trying to say.
Spirits leave their voices all over this beautiful world. I can feel the inexpressable love out there that mothers are feeling for their sleeping babes, for their growing changing children whom they drink up like a drug. I also feel them shivering with the inevitable fears we all have for our babies, the fears that make you want to scream so loud that the whole world will stop so that you will never have to see your baby die. I am listening, right now, to the gorgeousness of this minute. I can feel so much anticipation for the dropping leaves of fall, and I can feel thousands of eyes watching the sun set on the clear sky, the reddening leaves of the trees glowing against the green, casting it's own rich halo over all of our skin. I feel people's joys too, the kind that makes you jump out of your skin and lose your breath because it is so full of itself, so completely pure in the moment. Like a child who for no reason suddenly starts running and screaming with laughter, hairs rising on their arms with animal energy.
Medication helps to quiet the roar, so that I can live my life in relative peace. But it never completely leaves me. I arrange my life carefully to make sure I experience less of other people's pain which sometimes makes me want to rip myself open so that I can give of myself whatever it is that makes me come through pain over and over again, still loving life. Today, while I searched the shelves of the St. Vincent de Paul for possible overlooked gems, I couldn't shut out the people around me. A lady coughing with the deep phlegmy conviction of someone who has spent the last forty years sitting in a chair that wasn't even pretty when it was new, chain smoking filterless Marlboros while watching the Price Is Right. Her acquaintance who had the pallid complexion of a woman who has been sweeping church floors and eating canned yams without ever tasting the sunshine outside, the sunshine in the fruits of the earth.
And I can't forget the large woman in pants three sizes too small for her, with dull feathered hair, wearing the worn out look that women often get when they've been shacking up with poor excuses for men for way too long. Careworn. I want to cover her with rose petals, with everything that is healthy and new and fresh in this world. I want to guide her out of there and start her life over for her. Show her that she's worth a million better men, that she's got so much to find out there that isn't half broke already. Because she's starting to look too much like the chipped faded cheap china stacked carelessly on the bowing shelves.
I know that not everyone who shops at thrift stores are like that. Almost all of my friends shop in them. About a billion cool crafty people do. But those aren't the people I see when I'm there. Those aren't the people ringing me up. Those aren't the people who leave indelible impressions on my soft temple. Who haunt my dreams with all their needs unmet and their passions never more than half drawn against a steely backdrop. I came away with some cool things. But the price was, for me, much too high in the end. I am left once again needing to make the choice to pretend I'm like everyone else, or to protect myself, and risk showing my true mad colors to the world.
A lifetime of experience has taught me that no one will ever really be fooled about me. It's no use pretending to be anything that I'm not. My life is richest and best when I make decisions that protect me from the damage living in this world can do to my brain and to my nervous system. So I choose not to have access to television; I choose not to read the papers; I choose not to drive a car; I choose not to go to large parties; and now I am going to choose not to shop in places that make me wish I was God so I could take away all that dusty apathy and broken spirit and replace it with some measure of grace and love and plenty. I'll shop in antique stores where things are presented in some reverence and at least some effort to show the human detritus in the light of cherished objects.
I know that tonight I will dream of those ladies I saw in the St. Vincent de Paul. I will bleed a little in my sleep. Maybe someone else will hear me out there.