No. 13 of 50 -- Significant Objects v3

[Bid on this Significant Object, with story by James Reichmuth, here. This is the second installment in a four-part story by the members of Kasper Hauser. Proceeds from this auction go to Girls Write Now.]

One thing I won’t need if I open my own zoo is a lot of crap holding me back. Or sentimental/highly-valuable things:

This is a ’60s-era Mexican “Madero-type” of my dad, Dale Carpy; if you’re looking at this, you know what it is and how rare to have the original knots in excellent condition.

The photographer really captured Dale about to spring. Trust me, this wasn’t him just relaxing and smoking a joint. He was coiled up like a cat.

We probably drank 100,000 margaritas off of this tray, Joanie and I. I loved ‘em so much that she called me the “slushen-pumpy.”

Dad and Joanie getting a boat together, I admit it, really got me from my blind side.

Tommow: Part Three: Horse.

No. 12 of 50 -- Significant Objects v3

[Bid on this Significant Object, with story by Rob Baedeker, here. This is the first installment in a four-part story by the members of Kasper Hauser. Proceeds from this auction go to Girls Write Now.]

One night I looked at my saggy old beanbag, a sad black lump just lying on my living room floor like one of Bigfoot’s breasts.

That beanbag represented the old me.

I wear a Leatherman on my belt, and I gashed into that beanbag and didn’t stop sawing till I had a two-foot piece of leatherette.

That night I found a guy named LeatheretteBrad844@aol.com on the Internet who said he could do what I was looking for — make a pencil case with the texture of caiman (which is basically just a miniature alligator).

A lot of people choose alligator skin for their boots and cases, etc., but I chose the caiman to symbolize the conquering of a personal demon, but a demon of manageable size — to me, the idea that you could vanquish a full-on alligator is delusional. Start by wrestling the little guys. After you conquer your caimans, you can set your sites on the alligators.

I’m speaking symbolically, but I also used to work as a zookeeper, so I am actually pretty familiar with these kinds of reptiles/amphibians.

Now, I am hopping over the fence into the mind-work side of things — going back to finish my degree, with hopes of someday designing my own zoo or aquarium.

There are five pencils in the box. That’s my lucky number. I keep them unsharpened as a reminder of possibilities.

Tomorrow: Part Two: Gaucho Tray.

Object No. 4 of 50 -- Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this item, with story by Charles Baxter, has ended. Original price: $3.00. Final price: $23.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now.]

This beautiful object was discovered in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, by a high school student, Emily Traumer, on the corner of North First Street and Third Avenue. Emily was waiting for the morning bus and was bored, as adolescents usually are. Looking down to see if her Doc Martens were tied, she saw a meteorite on top of a pile of shoveled snow. She picked it up. It was still warm from its fiery entry through the Earth’s atmosphere.

She dropped the meteorite in her pocket. It radiated inter-stellar warmth throughout the bus ride all the way to Anton Kiesiewicz High School, where her science teacher, Mr. Duderstadt, complimented Emily for her sharp eyes. He pointed out to her that the shell pattern, quite characteristic of meteorites generally, was produced by the “turbo effect” of oxygen and nitrogen against the rock as it enters the atmosphere. The characteristic blue coloring on the larger side of the rock is a result of the “spectrum burning” of heat against the materials, producing a glass-like surface; hotter surfaces turn blue, while cooler surfaces, shielded from the direct heat of atmospheric forces, remain white. The formula for such heating, Mr. Duderstadt said, approaching his blackboard, could be written out as follows:

µ = ∑ (34f) – 2™ + $5.32≥4% x Ω ([@5£7] + ¥5)

He then inquired whether he might take the meteorite over to the University of Minnesota’s Fowlwell Hall, where the eminent astrophysicist, Professor Heinz Schlempp, might take a look. Emily agreed, somewhat reluctantly.

Four days later, Mr. Duderstadt returned with the meteorite. “Well, Emily,” he said, during his Wednesday science salon, “that’s a very interesting piece you have there.”

“Was Professor Schlempp able to determine of what materials the meteorite consisted?” Emily inquired, somewhat baffled, syntactically, by all the attention her discovery was garnering.

“Yes, he was,” Mr. Duderstadt said.

“What’s in it?” the impatient schoolgirl asked.
“Well, that’s the interesting part,” Mr. Duderstadt said, leaning back in his chair, and rearranging his necktie. “Professor Schlempp put it into his spectrometer, and then placed a tiny microscopic sample into the Gigatron® electron microscope, and then, dissatisfied with his result, put the meteorite into the university’s Super-Vulcan X-ray Analysis Machine, where a definitive analysis finally became possible.”

“And?”

“Well, here’s the surprise,” said the genial wizard of Kiesiewicz High. “The piece naturally has a high content of Iron, whose symbol, as you know, is fe. But more interesting was Schlempp’s discovery that the object has a high content of the rare earth, Probabilium, along with a certain amount of Potassium, Cyanide, and Blorth.”

“Blorth?” asked Emily. “That’s awesome!”

“The rarest of metals!” Mr. Duderstadt cried out. Turning around, he wrote on the blackboard again. “To get Blorth,” he said, “you have to have the following force-fields in an inter-active matrix.”

æ = 45£ ≠ 8! x µ2 ≥ 14®

“Wow,” the astonished teenager said.

“Exactly. This meteorite is priceless. And not only is it priceless, it’s beautiful. And useful.”

“I could use it as a paperweight,” Emily said.

“There’s no limit to a person’s imagination,” Mr. Duderstadt said, conclusively.

Object No. 2 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Padgett Powell, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $23.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now..]

It is little known that the singer Marcia Ball worked briefly as a teenager at Disney. One day at the close of the shift she was climbing out of her Goofy suit and was frightened to see two albino boys climbing out of their suits. It was Johnny and Edgar Winter. Marcia said something to the effect that she had never seen boys so white and Johnny turned on her and said, “I’m so white I am blind and I can’t take this shit that sun out there besides I can play the guitar.” Marcia liked his pluck.

Edgar said, “He can play but I can scream and I too have a frightening pallor and will look good on stage and, girl, you are so tall that I think even though you are full of melanin you can be a rock star too. Let’s blow this joint and—”

Johnny Winter was ahead of them, in the corner setting his Porky suit on fire. “Practicing,” he said. “I saw Jerry Lee do something like this on stage.”

This is Marcia Ball’s name tag, in the original packaging, circa 1962.

Object No. 1 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Jennifer Weiner, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $62. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now.]

We were married for sixteen years. When Christina was in Girl Scouts, she wanted to earn her sewing badge. I don’t sew: no time, no interest. Why squint, why prick your fingers, when you can pay the dry cleaner five bucks to hem your pants? Paul learned enough to teach Christina to sew on a button. She quit after she sewed that badge on her sash, but he kept going: latch-hook rugs, woven pot-holders, needlepoint pillows, Christmas tree ornaments with little animals or flowers.  If people came over and saw the canvas and embroidery hoops, I would say they were mine. Everyone but my mother pretended to believe it. Mom said, “You know where he goes at night, right? You know what he is?” Sure, I knew. There was a certain bar.  I didn’t think about it too much. Wherever he went at night, he came home to his needlepoint, to Christina. To me.

We got divorced in 1992. “I guess you know I’ve been unhappy,” is what he said. For a while, he’d come and see Christina, Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings. He’d take her to the IHOP. Breakfast for dinner. She loved that. But it only lasted for a while. He moved to Nevada, then Los Angeles, then Seattle.

Three months ago, Christina called me crying. “Daddy’s dead.” In Seattle? I thought. Turns out he’d moved back to Delaware and lived – and died – not ten miles away from where we’d lived together. Christina flew up from Miami, and I drove her to the apartment, in a rectangular concrete building that looked like a high school or a jail. In a liquor-store box were all of her report cards. A newspaper story about a track meet she was in. Her wedding announcement.

I’m angry at him, I guess. Some lady I saw on TV once, some scientist, was saying that it’s not a choice, that it’s in your blood or your DNA, but if he chose to be with me, if he fought it for that long, why couldn’t he keep fighting? Why couldn’t he have stayed with us?

Christina put the funeral on her credit card. “He was my Dad and I loved him,” she said. She’s a good girl to say that, even after she had to see the mess he left behind. And read the autopsy report, which I don’t know why they had to send her. Knowing how it happened doesn’t change anything. Dead is dead. And funerals, I am here to tell you, are expensive.

I don’t know what it means that he had them, that he kept them through all the places that he moved. I like to think that it meant we were connected, that he still thought of us. That in some way, we were still a family – my husband, Christina, and me.

Object No. 39 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this item, with story by Martha McPhee, has ended. Original price: $3.00. Final price: $20.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

My grandmother gave me the piggy bank when I was four, for Christmas, wrapped in a box with bows.  She said, “A penny saved is a penny earned.”  She said, “Find a penny pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck.”  She wore a beehive of blue hair, had piercing green eyes, dressed in expensive-seeming clothes.  “A lady of quality,” she said.  She sold Avon door to door and from the living room of her two-bedroom ranch on Lover’s Lane in Heather, Illinois.  Her house smelled like honeysuckle.

Only good-luck pennies went in my piggy bank.  It was the kind you had to smash to retrieve the coins, so as I accumulated them I had no idea how many pennies I had.  By the time I was in my thirties it was gathering dust and heavy, substantial with the weight, but I could jiggle it and feel there was still room.  I’d look at the feathery tiara and the jewel between the brow and think of all the luck the pig held.

I almost got married: here, in Heather, to a handsome guy who’d been the star of the high school football team.  I hadn’t known him then, but through his smile I could see him as a teenager—gleaming white teeth—driving fast in cars with girls excited that it was their turn.  Later, after we broke up, I realized those  had been the best days of his life.

“I want to see how many pennies are in the jar,” he said to me that afternoon: cold, the world covered in a thick snow.

“I’m not breaking it,” I said.

“With all those pennies, there’s one worth something.  There’re pennies worth thousands, you know.  We could get out of here.”  And he pointed out the window of my condo.  I owned from the walls in, but was proud of the views—vast expectant fields.

“I’m not breaking it,” I said.  “My grandmother gave it to me.”

“Your grandmother’s dead.”  He picked up the pig.

“I’m not dead,” I said, hiding my worry, that he’d drop the pig to have his way.

“You’re gonna wait ‘til you’re dead to find out if you’re rich?”

“Put it down, Jimmy.”  I shouldn’t have said that.  He lifted the pig higher, beautiful pig.  There are some people who just want to take what you’ve got.  Just then he dropped it.  You know the crush in your chest, its weight?  The pig’s mascara eyes, they were my grandmother’s looking at me still.  I lunged.

My grandmother once said to me, as I was pushing her up a hill in a wheel chair, “Amber, if we put our minds to it, we can do anything.”  I soared, arms out stretched to catch it, realizing, no matter what, that pig, its luck, would always be mine.

Object No. 35 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this MYSTERY Significant Object, with story by Ben Greenman, has ended. Original price: 99 cents. Final price: $103.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

This object was the first artifact found at the Hasegawa house in Osaka, Japan, in 2006, immediately following the death of Nobuhiko Hasegawa. The Nobuhiko Hasegawa in question here is, of course, the famed Japanese giant, not the successful table-tennis player of the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Nobuhiko Hasegawa, the giant, claimed a height of seven feet, eleven inches, though spinal deterioration rendered him unable to stand upright from the age of fifteen onward. Since he could not be measured, the title of Tallest Japanese Man was not formally extended to him and was granted instead to Yasutaka Okayama, who stood a relatively modest seven feet, eight inches.

Hasegawa was a man of limited intellect, at best, and he did not have any great investment in—or perhaps even an awareness of—this issue. But there were those around him who believed fiercely that he deserved recognition, just as there were those around Okayama who believed in their man. These self-appointed proxies enjoyed a spirited disagreement regarding this title right up until Hasegawa’s death, at which time a wag in the Okayama camp conceded the seven-foot-eleven-inch height but suggested that it be reduced by six feet to reflect burial. This self-styled wit happened to be British, which should be apparent given the failure of his remark to take into account Japanese burial practices, in which the body is cremated and the ashes placed in a shallow mairibaka, or grave for visitation. One of the most prominent backers of the Hasegawa claim, the poet Kentaro Nakano, released a statement in response to the Okayama camp’s alleged witticism; it consisted simply of the words “shame” and “dog.”

If Nobuhiko Hasegawa was possibly the tallest man in Japan, he was also possibly the oldest; on his wall, he a framed birth certificate that indicated a birth year of 1876. It recorded, ironically enough, that he had been born in Britain, and specifically in Coventry, where (he would explain if asked, in his glacial baritone) his mother was a cook for the English inventor James Starley. Starley, of course, was the father of modern bicycles, and in 1876, the year of the giant Hasegawa’s birth, he developed one of his most famous inventions: the Coventry Lever Tricycle. The Coventry Lever Tricycle was a vehicular breakthrough; prior to that, all Starley cycles were based on a quadrisected wheel design that, if sufficiently sturdy, proved too heavy and too expensive for mass production. As a very young child, Hasegawa would tell anyone who would listen, he rode nearly every Starley prototype. When, in 1881, Hasegawa’s mother decided to return to Japan after a quarrel with Starley—there are rumors that she was not in his employ, but rather his lover, and even rumors that Starley was Hasegawa’s true father—young Nobuhiko said farewell to this idyllic existence in Coventry. Within a decade, he would be confined to a wheelchair as a result of his rapid growth and the attendant spinal issues. “From three wheels to four,” he liked to say, shaking his head sadly. “From three to four.”

To reiterate: This object was the first artifact found at the Hasegawa house in Osaka, Japan, in 2006, immediately following the death of Nobuhiko Hasegawa. A second visit to the house was planned but never carried out; after the insensitive remarks regarding Hasegawa’s burial, the rivalry between the Hasegawa and Okayama camps escalated. The poet Kentaro Nakano was ambushed by a pack of Okayama adherents and defended himself with a glass bottle, blinding one of his attackers. The next day, the Hasegawa house was burned to the ground. This object in question, then, is the only remaining possession of a famed Japanese giant, and it resembles him in contraries: it is as small as he was large, as mobile as he was immobile, as bright as he was dull.

Object No. 31 of 50

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Julie Klausner, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $31.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

On the bus in the morning, Judith Zinn-Lasser squints to read the small classifieds in The New Yorker, in hopes of finding something really bizarre, like an ad for an island owned by plutocrats where you can hunt St. Bernards. George was a dog person. Is a dog person. He is not dead, he is just gone, and that’s fine and he and Mindy should be happy, because how can you be named “Mindy” and not be? It is a riddle, because the answer is, “you can’t.”

Judith lives with three cats and a foster kitten she will never be able to part with. When she is not at work, she is busy, or she is on the phone, complaining about being busy. She decided to take a wine pairing class. She’s been doing JDate. She’s going to do Zumba at the Y. She is cleaning out the apartment.

Which brings us to the cat napkin ring.

She bought a set of them in a gift shop years ago, when she and George spent a long weekend on Cape May. Is it “in” or “on” a cape? How funny that “Cape” and “Sound” are two words that we teach to children, only to have them mean completely different things when we let geologists have their way with them. The words, not the children.

So, Cape May. Judith was a slip of a thing at the time, and they had the two “boys” back at home, which were not children — they were cats. I say “were,” because now they are dead. But they were great cats; Zenith and Mazel Tov. The Tabby brothers. The gift shop was called Mother May I? and Judith had already bought a thing of candy to bring back to her sister, Ellen, when the napkin rings caught her eye. She decided they were chic and dear.

She wanted to have dinner parties because she and George were newlyweds then, and she relished the adult time they shared before kids, which is another way of saying she wanted — she expected — to have children with him. But they never really had the kind of dinner party you think of when somebody says “dinner party” — all flowing red wine and cowl neck sweaters and clinking grown-ups telling stories about things they think are interesting. The cat napkin rings disappeared over time, swallowed by the quicksand-like detritus in the drawers where they were kept, loose, floating among loose change, keychains, subscription cards, trial-size samples of cream.

I can’t even tell you how many birthday cards Judith dumped into the recycling the other day. She emptied the whole drawer into the bin: twenty-seven years of cards from George: “Jude, happiest [BLANK]-th. I love you.” Every year another cartoon cat. Sandra Boynton’s fuzzy gray fatties with attitudes, bucolic kittens in baskets, “funny” cards that Photoshopped sunglasses and Hawaiian shirts onto chubby orange tabbies. Something about being a party animal? Or over the hill? Now, it’s garbage. There’s only one napkin ring left, and it’s next to go in her Great Purge. It’s nice to have a home with life, with clutter, with warmth. But it’s good to get rid of things.

Object No. 30 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Philip Graham, has ended. Original price: 99 cents. Final price: $28.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

Lily hesitates before the open door of the empty pantry. Alone on one of the shelves sits a silvery white saltshaker, seemingly the only thing left behind by whoever once lived in this small house. Lily’s finger follows the puncture marks of the S that stretches across the top, and she imagines the tiny awl, the steady hand, the tap of the hammer.

She shakes it, but no grains rattle inside. When she begins to twist off the top, a faint metallic scrape of the threads stops her, as if the sound were some warning. She places the shaker back on its shelf.

After days of unpacking her boxes, everything finally rests in its new place except for Lily’s violin, which travels with her from room to room as she leans into the music, letting loose a waltz, a reel, a mad jig. But music doesn’t burn the past to ash so easily; instead, it seems to light the present on fire.

Weary from walking a sad music, Lily sits alone at the kitchen table, the pull of the strings still inside her, a sound so much like scratching that she’s afraid the walls, the wooden floors are marked with invisible scars. As Lily works her way through salad greens and a wedge of dark bread, she looks across the room at the pantry, at the saltshaker still alone on its shelf, so empty.

She knows that any emptiness — like the hollow of her violin — has hidden ways to speak. Maybe she should fill it. But why salt? Why not staples, or sequins? Shells, maybe. Better yet, sparks.

Or a sea, a tiny one.

Eyes closed, Lily imagines pushing off from the shore in a boat, to see if the rising waves might take her somewhere unexpected, the way music used to do. Soon she arrives at a deserted beach where a single tree stands, one long crooked branch pointing the way to a market in the distance.

The wooden stalls are busy with people trading things that mean nothing to her, and she’s about to leave when she sees a gray-haired woman guarding a table where a familiar object waits: a silvery white metal shaker with puncture wounds across the top, though these shape a P. Again, Lily imagines the tiny awl, the steady hand, a hammer’s tap.

She doesn’t have to touch the shaker to know that it’s empty too, and that she could fill it with anything: pins, pegs, dried petals. A plea. Patience.

Only when Lily holds this lost companion as her own does she breathe out carefully, thinking that all she needs to do now is retrace her path to the beach, the boat, and then she will find her way back to her new home.

Object No. 25 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Vicente Lozano, has ended. Original price: $2.99. Final price: $37.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

This little smoking man did not appear in Inglourious Basterds. But he came close.

Back in 2007, during  development, Quentin Tarantino was visiting the Santa Monica bungalow of Kimberly Van de Hoeven. She had art directed an update of Amazon Jail and several other movies Tarantino admired; he wanted to feel out the possibility of her working on his World War II movie.

As Van de Hoeven recalled, they were sitting in her sun-flooded living room, making small talk about how Zodiac could have been a great movie, had it not been so slavishly devoted to ’70s period detail. When Tarantino noticed the figurine on the mantle, he jumped up from the sectional couch.

What in the hell was this? Tarantino grinned. He turned it over in his hands. The Smoking Man reminded him of his Uncle Gino, he said, down to the walleyes and stogie: a sheet metal union man all of his life. Examining it, Tarantino grew excited. He began waving the little man around.

See, this is what he was talking about. This Little Guy, he could be from the 1940s or the 1870s — it didn’t matter. He read as homey, that was the important thing, as one of those weird personal objects people had put in their parlors since I Love Lucy or before. This was where Zodiac had gotten it wrong, with its too devoted attention to scuzzed-out ’70s pirate FM radio.

With this Little Guy you could telegraph family, hearth, menace — all in one shot. How cool was that? Tarantino’s face had reddened alarmingly. Very, said Kimberly. She tugged at her yoga tank top and tried to smile.

There was a scene in the upcoming project, Tarantino continued. By now he was pacing. A Nazi officer interviewed a French Farmer who was hiding Jews. They would sit at a kitchen table.

Imagine Mister Smokes here, lurking in the background. We put him in a nook, we put him on the counter, right? As the officer asks questions the camera pans over the uniformed shoulder, past the farmer’s cowlick, up and into this sweet little manatee face, until it fills the screen. Tension, with a capital ‘T.’

Whatdayathink? Tarantino grinned. He looked proud as a schoolboy. That’s why you’re going to let me have him, right?

Kimberly threw back her head laughing. At that moment she thought: 1. Wow, he really acts like a Director and  2. This belonged to my grandfather, who escaped the camps at Blesdijke. No frigging way I can give it to him.

Van de Hoeven stuttered an apology, told him it was a family… thing. Tarantino reassured her it was cool. They finished their smoothies, shook hands. Quentin said he said he would be in touch. Two weeks later he called: they had brought someone else on board. But QT said he had a re-make of Viva Zapata! in mind, and that she was at the top of his list.