Object No. 94 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Victor LaValle, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $51.99.]

Who the hell goes to Portugal? In my family?

The question arose as my sister and I were going through my grandmother’s things—her effects. She’d died of old age at Queens General Hospital and she’d been longing for it. Some people never want to go, but not her. She’d lived long (96 years), seen her grandkids and great grandkids.

The old lady didn’t own the apartment she’d lived in, alone, for 22 years. After she died my grandmother’s landlord (New York City Housing Authority) sent a letter: two weeks to clear her things. Then they would be bagged and bussed to a dump. So my sister and I spent evenings taking the 7 train to Jackson Heights, climbing nine flights to grandma’s apartment (her elevator was about as reliable as our older sister). We decided what to keep, what to sell, what to donate, and what to leave for the City.

Let’s be blunt: the mitt’s not pretty. Okay, it’s ugly as an unwashed butt. I didn’t find it in my grandmother’s kitchen. Or in the living room, where she’d sit and have tea in the afternoons. It was in her bedroom, slipped between the mattress and box spring. Some old ladies stow bags of cash, my grandmother hid a Portuguese cooking glove. I showed it to my sister, but she’d found my grandmother’s small Bible. Was leafing through, marveling at the notes our grandmother left in the margins. She got the Good Book; I kept the mitt.

Then, I brought the thing home and forgot about it! My sister and me, we helped our mother through the next few months. Eventually I found myself getting back into life. Like I started going on dates again. My head clear, my heart ready, my bed cold. So one night I’ve got this lovely woman at my place. She comes over to split a bottle of wine while we prepared a meal. My part consisted of uncorking the bottle. Meanwhile she made squash soup. The second or third step is to bake the two halves of a split squash, hot enough until you can peel back the rough outer skin with a butter knife. She opens the oven door and asks for a mitt to pull out the tray and what do I reach for? That’s right. Had it in a cupboard over the sink.

My friend slides the glove on, reaches into the oven, but as she’s pulling the tray she loses her grip and the squash goes to the ground. I just laughed. I was drunk, and this pretty lady had already let me kiss her. What could I be upset about?

But she wore another expression. Not anger.  Not pain. Bewilderment. She slipped the oven mitt off and turned it inside out. I thought she was going to rip it so I shouted, but then I saw the inside of the oven mitt. It was covered in words.

Not writing. Letters stitched into the fabric! We read the words, starting at the top, where the middle finger would reach. It read: My dearest Grace (that’s my grandmother) I hold your memory like I held your form. I feel sunlight across my body and the warmth of you. The warmth of being inside you…

And it went on like that.

A lot.

Turns outs my grandmother was kind of a slut!

My friend and I poured wine. Toasted the old woman. Good for her.

Object No. 83 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Nomi Kane, here. Original price: 49 cents. Final price: $37. This story is the second in a three-part series produced in collaboration with The Center for Cartoon Studies. ]

Object No. 58 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Tim Carvell, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $35.]

On December 17, 1948, the Humboldt twins entered the world, Jerome screaming, Luke laughing. This pattern held. Jerome grew up to be as petulant, difficult and miserable as Luke was cheery, optimistic and polite.

Their father, Max, owned the Humboldt Tiny Decorative Box Corp., the main employer in Ossipee, N.H. He grew to hope Luke might one day take over the business. After all, Luke loved crafts — at the age of nine, he’d papier-mâchéd a doghouse in a perfect replica of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wingspread House. (The doghouse remained sadly unoccupied, as Jerome’s cock-fighting ring had placed the family on the ASPCA’s “watch list.”) But at his wife Sheila’s urging, to avoid the appearance of favoritism, in 1969 Max willed the business to both boys.

This was a horrible mistake. Not six months after drawing up the will, Max died from what is known in the decorative-box trade as “varnish lung.” (The coroner tactlessly described Max’s lungs to Sheila as “the shiniest I’ve ever seen.”) At the time, Luke was in Ecuador with the Peace Corps, teaching tribal children appliqué and découpage. And so it fell to Jerome to lead the company.

To everyone’s surprise, Jerome leaped at the opportunity. Far from lacking interest in the family trade, he’d quietly written a manifesto, “On the Morality of the Small Box,” arguing that tiny boxes were a means to liberate the world from falsehood — and any box that failed to do so was “a plywood sin.” He swiftly redesigned the company’s wares, banishing all forms of decoration; the factory soon produced only severe black boxes, adorned with 9-point Courier declarations: “Love is a precursor to sorrow.” “Joy fades.” “Pets die.”

The boxes were a disaster. Within six months, business had tapered off to zero, and the payroll dwindled to one: Jerome. Ignoring the pleas of the townspeople, Jerome persisted, drinking heavily and hand-making his grim boxes late into the night.

What happened on Christmas Eve, 1970 was, Sheila insists, an accident; out of deference to her, let us say that it was. That night, Jerome accidentally fell into the hydraulic laminator, having accidentally disabled its safeguards. The machine swiftly rendered his body into a shiny oblong disc of viscera. Horrifically, his body was found by none other than his brother, who tiptoed into the factory early Christmas morning, hoping to surprise his father and share tales of his Ecuadoran glitter co-operative, only to find his brother’s pressed corpse.

Such an event might have broken another man. But Luke worked through his grief, throwing himself into designing his brother’s coffin. To accommodate the corpse’s unusual shape, the container was necessarily round, and he decorated the lid with a tender photo of Sheila cradling Jerome. (A photo, Sheila later confided to friends, snapped moments before Jerome bit her.) But the night before the funeral, the casket remained maddeningly incomplete. Then Luke’s eyes lit upon the inscription on one of his brother’s boxes: “To one person, you may be the world, but to the world, you’re only one person.” And he realized that it needed but a slight tweak. In what became number 3 on Small Box Monthly‘s list of the 100 Most Significant Moments of the 20th Century, Luke Humboldt reached for the paint. He wrote: “To the world, you may be only one person, but to one person, you may be the world.”

The next morning, as the casket was lashed to the roof of a hearse, an onlooker muttered, “Now there’s a box someone might buy.” And Luke — looking out upon the unemployed citizens of Ossipee — knew what he had to do. That very evening, he started producing small replicas of Jerome’s splendid coffin. To you, this may be just one small box. But to Luke Humboldt, this box contains the world.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Joanne McNeil, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $20.50.]

Among the many misconceptions that prevail about my great-grandfather, Hartford Townes Hastings, the most infuriating is the idea that he was a disinterested playboy benefactor, squandering the family fortune on “women and dreams,” as the New York Sun obituary put it. He was reserved, but kind and idealistic, a vegetarian since childhood. I never saw him drink or cuss or eat more than a few bites of anything. I believe history will redeem him as a frustrated artist, rather than a failed businessman.

After Amherst College, rather than a position at the family surgical dressings business, he went to Paris to create “surrealist craft art,” elaborate wood carvings and collage. None of his work survived the return back over the Atlantic, although he salvaged parts of “Birds Nesting in Quilted Landscape.” He stored the ceramic eggs and mushrooms, dried flowers, and bits of grain in an old pill box and preserved it in glass. My great-grandfather kept the “little grain thing” at his bedside for twenty years, as a reminder never to give up on art.

In 1925, he married my great-grandmother Rose Fox Townes Hastings, the daughter of a New York police officer and the face of Elizabeth Arden’s first print ad. Together they conceived of The Museum of Modern Craft. It opened in 1941, when the world had other priorities. In fact, it was a thinly disguised plan to display his own art, as “Pierce Mancini.” He even displayed the grain keepsake near the entrance, attributed to his pseudonym as “Wistfully, lingering away in the Heartland, 1929.” Due to enormous losses, the museum closed seven years later. The building was sold to the city and turned into an administrative office. My great-grandmother divorced him shortly thereafter.

His tea importing business was a disaster, he lost millions in multiple real estate developments, and a typhoon flooded the small island he purchased in the South Pacific before the 300-suite artist colony could open. The idea behind each of these pursuits was that one day he might secure the funds to reopen The Museum of Modern Craft.

Later in life, at the encouragement of Joseph Cornell, his best friend since Andover, my great-grandfather returned to his “surrealist crafts,” scouring junk shops from Cape Cod to the 6th arrondissement for anything to cobble together. He and Cornell had plans to create an entire city of old dollhouses. The project was abandoned after Cornell’s death in 1972. I have the sketches for it, as well as thirty-seven of my great-grandfather’s unfinished pieces.

My great-grandfather declared bankruptcy in 1992 and died in 1995, in a manufactured home in Woods Hole. I found his “little grain thing” among a dozen other thrift store treasures in a cardboard box marked in black sharpie, “For Joseph.”

[The auction for this Significant Object, with song (MP3, and lyrics, below), by Teddy Blanks, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $2.38. This was part of a special collaboration with Design Observer, where it was co-published here.]

CLICK BUTTON to listen to “Figurines” by Teddy Blanks.

“Figurines”

All those years we were married,
You, the beloved host of a daytime talk show
I’d stay home with the children
arranging your figurines for display

Now I stare at the mantle
Fixed on a small white porcelain motor scooter
Remembering how you told me
You wanted to ride a real one someday

Studio B, and all the lights
Flashing lowly in your metered dreams
TVs have taken flight
Leaving your objects rusting away

Three straight days of headline news
Your memorial, it was deeply moving
All the stars call to tell me
“She was the queen of daytime TV”

But I’m stuck here with your boxes, baby
Just like it was on the day you left here
you took off on your scooter,
leaving the porcelain one to me

Were you asleep? Was it too dark
when you swerved across the boulevard,
and all the braking cars,
crashing directly into a tree?

Walked right up to an ambush
They were just standing there like a ticking task force,
sisters reading your diary,
combing the wreckage, taping the scene

Camouflaged in the background,
I’m just a footnote in the life of a fallen legend,
father of her two children,
keeping her archives ordered and clean

Studio B, and all the lights
Flashing lowly in your metered dreams
and all that’s left in sight
is your collection of figurines

[Guitar on 'Figurines' played by Patrick Albertson]

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Sarah Weinman, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $26.]

A week after the shiva, still not quite used to seeing my own reflection in the uncovered mirrors, I mustered up the nerve to sift through my aunt Holly’s belongings. Well, she wasn’t exactly my aunt; she’d married my mother’s younger brother Joey at the tail end of the disco era, and even though the union hadn’t even lasted two years — he’d had a chronic habit of snorting the cocaine he was supposed to sell — she and I had stayed close through two more marriages and peripatetic travels.

But I hadn’t talked to her in a couple of years, not since my own long-term living arrangements collapsed in financial and emotional disaster, and was in the process of slinking back to my parents’ house in disgrace when I heard Holly was dead. The news did not surprise me; finding out she’d owned her own home, and that she had bequeathed it to me, did.

Holly was the prototype for suitcase living, constantly admonishing me against accumulating crap “because if you get tied down, the rope burns will sting for the rest of your life.” How could I reconcile the anarchic wanderer and her endless stories of the semi-famous men she’d run around with after the Playboy Clubs closed for the night, the woman whose platonic ideal for living was a houseboat in Sausalito, with the never-ending collection of tchotchkes piled high in the living room? What use had Holly had for an emerald-encrusted turtle or twenty-seven kinds of acrylic plants?

A few disheartening hours later, I found the only object in the house that reminded me of the Holly I had loved: a unicorn figurine. It was on the nightstand next to her four-poster bed and the horn glistened like it had been polished just the other day. I picked it up and time-traveled in my mind back to the first time I met Holly, her dirty brown hair parted in the middle, six weeks before she married a man even I, at the age of eight, knew was the wrong one. Before saying hello, she’d burst into a song I’d never heard before:

There were green alligators and long-necked geese
Some humpty-backed camels and some chimpanzees
Some cats and rats and elephants, but sure as you’re born
The loveliest of all was the unicorn

Holly sang that song every year on my birthday in a tinny, off-pitch voice that seemed just right. Looking at the unicorn’s playful eyes and gold-flecked horn, the song’s last line sounded in my head just the way she and I would yell it out together.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Stewart O'Nan, has ended. Original price: $3. Final price: $71.]

Every evening when Henry came home from work, without fail, he set his briefcase on the marble-topped table in the front hall, climbed the stairs to their room, faced the dresser and emptied his pockets before hanging up his jacket and tie and washing for supper. Occasionally one or the other of the children shadowed him as he performed this ritual, eager to obtain a final, binding permission or appeal an earlier verdict of hers, but Emily actively discouraged this, as she discouraged outright lobbying at the table. She tried to make his transition from office to hearth as relaxing as possible, to the extent that she refrained from following him up, even if she’d spent the afternoon fretting over some pressing domestic issue only his considered input could resolve.

The tray in which he deposited his wallet and keyring and change had been his father’s, a period piece which seemed by its design to represent a bygone and overblown masculinity she associated with Anglophile prep schools and stuffy hunt clubs. A painstakingly detailed mallard’s head, forged from some cheap metal, rose from the partitioned rosewood dish, as if half of it might be employed as a decoy. Emily had never liked the duck, as they called it, despite its sentimental origins, but now that Henry was gone, she couldn’t part with it.

Neither could she use it. The change, which Betty dusted every other Wednesday, had resided there since Henry had gone into the hospital, eight years ago, and while Emily took no great pleasure or comfort in the meager hoard, every other Wednesday after Betty left, she made a sober reconnaissance of the duck. Only then, reassured of the order of things, could she sleep.

So it was with more than mild surprise, the week after Easter, that she noticed the two quarters which sat on top (one heads, the other tails) were gone. Kenneth and Lisa had visited the weekend prior. Immediately she suspected Sam, and just as quickly chided herself, knowing his sensitivity about his troubled history. The possibilities weren’t numberless, though, and as she lingered in her nightgown with a soothing Bach prelude playing by her bedside, she realized that whether she wanted to or not, she would never know the solution to this mystery, and rather than let this new arrangement stand, she scooped up the remaining coins, shook them in her fist like dice and dropped them back in the dish, thinking, already, of what she would tell Betty if she happened to ask.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Susannah Breslin, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $36.88]

I reached my hand into the drawer, withdrew it, and looked at what lay in my palm. “ALL AMERICAN OFFICIAL NECKING TEAM,” the pin read. It was hard to reconcile the words with my father. At this point, he had been dead for nearly 15 years. After he had passed away, my mother and I had stood over the dining room table upon which sat a large box that contained what was left of him. Cremains, the man had called them. My father, I had longed to correct him. Thankfully, my mother had been willing to share what remained of him with me, his only son. My father was a skyscraper of a man — six-foot-five, Ozymandias hands, a brooding forehead — a great man, really — and so, he had left a great deal of himself behind. I dipped a teaspoon into the mound of his ashes and placed three or so tiny shovelfuls into a plastic bag. I fastened the bag with a twist-tie. I put the bag in a small wooden box that smelled faintly of the peach tea it had once held. Later, my mother handed me a bag of his things, which, to be perfectly honest, I had forgotten about — until today, when I spotted it in the back of the drawer, behind my wife’s underwear, and reached into the leather case and pulled the pin from it.

I imagined my father had won his place on the All-American Necking Team sometime during 1953, his senior year at Brooklyn Preparatory. I knew what he looked like back then from photographs: a young man with deep-set eyes undershadowed by dark circles, his long form gangly with the awkwardness of his youth, a thin tie knotted at the base of his bird-like neck. Once, my mother had told me about his penchant for drinking Zombies, about the time in the middle of a party, he had proclaimed, “I’m a tree,” and then fallen flat to the floor, how she had stolen him from another woman older than her, who had a child — and in the remembering, my mother had smiled. But that summer, his father, my grandfather, a frustrated CPA with a roaring temper fueled by an abiding love of Four Roses and the failures of the Brooklyn Dodgers, had fallen dead of a heart attack while taking the IRT subway to work one day, and my father’s life had changed forever. Instead of trundling off to some Ivy League college, he had stayed in Flatbush, enrolled at Brooklyn College, and dutifully taken care of his mother, a woman I’d never met, whose name was Rose.

Looking down at the pin staring up at me like a Cyclops, looking through this portal into a time wherein I was nothing but a flickering flash in one of my father’s constellation of neurons, I wondered who this all-star necker was: my father, a young man not unlike myself, or something else altogether—a man beyond my understanding now relegated to a past that lay on the other side of a bridge where the land was so dark that I could no longer see him.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Jonathan Goldstein, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $6.25.]

Twenty years after the man’s death, I still can’t rightly say whether my uncle Dwayne was a benevolent old-timey Grandpa Walton type or a secret sadistic performance artist. By the time I met him, Dwayne was a retired concierge with shaky hands. He claimed it was because of the heavy vibrating machines he employed to polish banisters. When he affectionately placed his large hand on your shoulder, it felt like a gentle shower massage. Another thing I still remember about Dwayne was that he always had for us a pocket full of tiny unwrapped butterscotch candies that all stuck together, we suspected, because he’d begun to suck on them and had stopped half way through.

Every year, for each of our birthdays, Dwayne presented us with a toy made to mimic some common household appliance. On the occasion of my cousin Bernice’s birthday, he presented her with a toy hot plate that pretty much looked like a regular hot plate to the last detail— except for the fact it didn’t work.
“Why not just give a real one,” asked Bernice. “It’d be fun to bring it to school and make pancakes for lunch.”

“Real hot plates aren’t for children,” he’d say. “Besides, toy ones are more fun.”

She conceded the point, but really, there was very little that was toy-like about his gifts. One year he gave my brother Charlie a “toy” vacuum cleaner. It was exactly like a real one, weighing about forty pounds. Thing was, it didn’t work. To make it more child-friendly, Dwayne had drawn tremulous polka-dots all over it with his palsied hand. Charlie loved it. Over the years, Dwayne presented us with, among other things, a toy coffee maker (the pot filled with all white gumballs), a toy toilet plunger (wrapped in colourful tinsel), a toy mop (that smelled of real sewage), a toy caulking gun (in a little toy holster he’d made out of red electrical tape), and a toy steak knife set that we used to eat make-believe cutlets.

The toaster, pictured, was given to me for my seventh birthday and it was always one of my favourites. On the day he gave it to me he asked several questions:

“How do you spell ‘roast’?”

“R-o-a-s-t,” I said, proud of what a good speller I was.

“How do you spell ‘coast’?”

“C-o-a-s-t.”

“And how do you spell what you put in a toaster?”

“T-o-a-s-t.”

“Wrong!” he said, the word sounding like an electrical buzzer going off. “B-r-e-a-d. Bread goes into a toaster. Toast comes out.”

But the thing with a toy toaster is that bread goes in and bread comes out. There’s something refreshing and unexpected about that. I remember many afternoons spent gazing into the slot and really hoping that I might see the inside slowly growing orange with heat. So think of this as a kind of exercise machine — not for the tightening of your buttocks or the growth of your biceps — but for the strengthening of a more childlike muscle: your capacity for hope.

Maybe Uncle Dwayne was trying to teach us that things have a value that transcend what they’re actually able to accomplish. But more likely than not, he was unloading junk he no longer needed.

[The bidding on this Significant Object, with story by Lydia Millet, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $22.72.]

I went with my friend G to her great aunt’s house a few weeks after the aunt passed away. G had been called in by the family to pick out one or two keepsakes. Because she lived in a cramped studio in Hell’s Kitchen she didn’t want anything, a, and b, according to G’s mother every item of value had been carted away five minutes after the old lady died, by a daughter-in-law no one liked. By the time G was called in to make a selection they’d already held the estate sale, so all that was left were the sale rejects. “Harsh,” said G, but she decided to go anyway because it was June and New York City was hot and humid and stank. The aunt had lived in one of those nice little towns on the Hudson, green with a pleasant breeze, and the train would let us out about three blocks from her house. Also there was a good diner in the town that G, who was a part-time food critic with a specialty in burgers, wanted to try.

So we got in the train one Saturday afternoon and we went to the house. It was a modest fake Tudor place, pretty much empty now except for a few dusty boxes of trinkets. G’s second cousin R was there, who she hadn’t seen since they were fourteen, went to summer camp together, and ended up making out. (She told me that later.) Now he lived in Jersey and had a lot of tattoos. They sat on the stoop smoking and talking while I rummaged around in the boxes, just for something to do. They were mostly ceramics of chickens, cows, and other livestock, the kind of cheerfully painted ones some ladies like to keep in their kitchens. Beats me why they do that. Maybe they want to feel their kitchens are farmhouses. Anyway, no one wanted these things. Some had been thrown into the boxes carelessly and were already chipped.

I’d never met the great aunt but as the sun sank low outside, G and R’s laughter floated in to me, and shadows crept over the bare living room floor, I started to feel bad for all those abandoned barnyard animals. I picked through the pigs and roosters with a kind of sadness until finally I found Chili Cat. Ugly as sin, there was no getting around that. No reason at all for the cat to be festooned with red chilis. There was a Mexican motif, I guessed. Maybe Tex-Mex. Chili Cat was supposed to be festive.

G never picked out anything, herself. We went with R to the diner and afterward we sat drinking and looking out at the river. Because she was homely, and all those boxes were full of the homeless, I took Chili Cat home.