I’ve discovered my new favorite place on earth
Obsolescence, mortality and buns of steel
No, it isn’t the leather couch in front of a wood-burning stove in a cabin with dark wood walls and floors in the snowy, silent Himalayas. Nor is it the arched doorway through which you see the Taj Mahal for the first time, a white, otherworldly apparition that makes you wonder if you have stepped into a fairy tale. And it isn’t a bright green boat atop the silvery water of the Ganges, moving toward the horizon, where the sky drips pink and gold at sunrise. It isn’t any place I visited in India, with its rich textures, narrow streets, saturated colors, curious ruins, and mystifying, dense juxtapositions of sounds, shapes, and humanity.
It’s the Goodwill outlet store in St. Louis.
Across from the ominous building with the broken windows.
Diagonal from the new Ikea that’s going up, bright yellow and blue, sitting there like it owns the place.
(Like a herald of the coming Dystopia.)
You know you’re there when you hear the cawing of the bird of prey that lives on the roof, or when you see a guy in the parking lot with dark crooked glasses and red leather pants and leopard print boots and a fanny pack listening to a Walkman.
You know you’re there when you walk inside and see people with masks and gloves digging through bins.
This isn’t my mother’s Goodwill. Not the pretty one in Canton we used to visit on Mother’s Day with the racks of color-coordinated clothes and the mannequins decked out in spring dresses and beaded bracelets and the rows of neatly shelved inspirational, self-help, weight loss, and children’s books.
Nor is it a certain Goodwill that gives itself airs by using the word “boutique” and charging 25 bucks for a pair of pants.
No, this Goodwill is the repository for the refuse of America: In other words, this is the Goodwill’s Goodwill.
Final stop before the landfill.
They sell stuff by the pound here. You put your glassware on a scale on the counter. You put your cart on a scale on the ground. You bring your own bags.
Why is this my new favorite place in the world, you ask, just in case it isn’t obvious?
There are three reasons.
First, I dig the fashion. Today I am dressed head-to-toe in clothing purchased at the Goodwill Outlet.
Second, I like the feeling of disorientation. A kind of vertigo. Most people have to drink a few glasses of wine for this feeling. Last week I went to the Goodwill Outlet three times, and as I dug through bins of curtains and naked Barbie dolls and the various pieces of a crystal punch bowl set, I stumbled upon some pinstriped pants and I thought, “These are good teaching pants.” And then I thought, “I should buy them for the fall.” And then I remembered: “I am not a teacher anymore.” And also: “It’s spring in St. Louis, and there is a whole summer before the fall.”
Outside there are flowering dogwood trees and there is the scent of lilac, and there are flowers in the medians, and all the parks are green, greener than anything I saw in India.
But my body is still waiting for the fall, for the leaves to change color and carpet the ground and lie beneath the snow.
My body does not know what season it’s in.
And then I realized, this is a metaphor for everything.
At the Goodwill Outlet, metaphors are 29 cents a pound.
That’s the third reason it’s my favorite place on Earth.
It’s best to go in the morning before the crowds come, because digging through those bins is a contemplative act, and I don’t know about you, but I hate being crowded when I’m contemplating. Also the sun through the glass — the light beams and dust motes, etc — are nice. They make you think of donuts and coffee. You know, morning things.
You’ll want to be in the right frame of mind when you stumble across the red mug that looks exactly like the one you bought at Target eight years ago — the one with the fancy handle that gets too hot in the microwave (an indication that it probably isn’t microwave-safe) — the one that you donated to Goodwill before you left the country six months ago — the one you drank your Dunkin’ Donuts coffee out of every morning for those eight years before running off to class, and later, to work. And then you notice the part that’s chipped off: Was that there before?
And then, with a weird, creepy shudder:
IS THIS THE SAME MUG?!
You put it back in the bin next to the Buns of Steel VHS tape and move on to the next pile of stuff.
And there, an innocent brown jacket. Just like the one you used to wear. A jacket you got at a garage sale. Same texture. Same size. Same sparkly silver buttons, just a little loose, threads holding them down a bit lax and distended. Same brand name on the label: “Kikit.
You dare not put your hand in the pocket, lest you find yourself pulling out the fortune you got at a Chinese buffet two years ago:
“You will go through a hard time. Then you will be happier.”
After you have the usual thoughts about waste and consumerism and landfills, and maybe something about child labor in Asia, you begin to wonder why you gave away 75% of your stuff and emptied out a place you used to live in only to move to a new empty place with no stuff and frantically to accumulate more stuff only to frantically sell/give it away before moving to…well, you don’t exactly know where you’re living now but here you are, buying more stuff and soon you’ll be getting rid of it all so you can move again to an empty place and buy more stuff to fill it up and who knows what’s going to happen after that.
And then you have this idea for a novel you’re going to write. It’s going to be a novel about a red mug you buy at Target and all the adventures it has before it ends up in the bin at the Goodwill Outlet next to the Buns of Steel VHS tape.
Or maybe it’s a novel about the Buns of Steel VHS tape?
Anyway, it’s a novel about obsolescence. It’s a novel in which a person — I mean an object — asks, “Am I still useful? Will someone find me here in this bin, or am I headed for the landfill?”
And then you answer, “Of course you are still useful. My grandma has a VHS player.”
But then you have doubts: Does Grandma really aspire to have “Buns of Steel?”
And even if she does, what if she never finds the VHS tape underneath the mauve curtains?
And what about the mauve curtains?
The novel is also about mortality, because ultimately we are all headed for the landfill.
But what do we do in the meantime, if we feel like we are relegated to the Goodwill Outlet bins of life? Underneath a heap of crocheted doilies and Barry Manilow 45s? What if we feel like we have something to offer, but no one wants what we are offering, or they can’t find us?
For instance, maybe there is a lady in Albuquerque, New Mexico looking for some Barry Manilow 45s. But she is looking in all the wrong places– Ebay, used record stores, etc — and all the while, you’re yelling, “29 cents a pound! Goodwill Outlet! St. Louis!” But she can’t hear you.
I posed this question (not the specific question about Barry Manilow and Albuquerque) to a local pastor here in Peoria — as if this were some deep theological question — and the conversation went something like this:
“What if you feel like an object in a Goodwill bin that keeps being overlooked and you think you still have some moderate usefulness but it feels like no one sees you or is interested in what you have to offer?”
And he said, “If you’re a Rembrandt, you’re a Rembrandt. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a Goodwill bin or not.”
Well, I wasn’t thinking Rembrandt…more like a blender that has a good five years in it … but I got his point. He was making a point about human worth, about inherent human dignity, apart from usefulness in the way that we normally think about it.
Like a work of art.
To some utilitarian types, a Rembrandt isn’t very useful at all.
To others, its only use is its decorativeness: “Does it go with the mauve curtains?”
To others, it’s about the name. “It’s a Rembrandt, people. He’s, like, a famous artist.”
But to some, art transcends utility, or fame, or decorativeness. It is a material thing that points to the immaterial part of our humanity — the part that will never languish in a landfill.
Or, to be more Christian and less dualistic about it, art points to the part of us that will triumph over the decay that all materiality is subject to.
Because of my Christian faith, I live in the hope that I will rise from the landfill with all my buttons in place. It doesn’t matter how many years I spent in a Goodwill bin.
Moreover, if I believe this — and I do — I must believe that the God who sees every sparrow that falls to the ground has his eye on every item — no matter how broken, obsolete, misunderstood, or passed over — in the Goodwill Outlet bins.
Happy Easter.
Originally published at jessamynmusic.com on April 17, 2015.
