Well, I might be able to be friends with her when I’m done being mad. And envious. And disappointed. And full of regret. But I bet I’d really like her when I was done with all these reactions.
First, the back story.
I like to shop in antique stores, consignment stores, and second-hand stores with items that are too new to be antique, so basically they sell pre-owned (don't you love how “used cars” got upgraded a few years back?) items that are usually still in pretty good shape. I also pop in to my local Goodwill for an exciting hunt now and then.
But I’ve got very particular taste. The kind of taste that doesn’t surprise some people who think I’m high maintenance, but since I’m shopping for leftovers, I tend to think I’m pretty low maintenance. I’ll be completely satisfied with the things that I fall in love with. And I’m content to find nothing.
For our anniversary two years ago, my husband and I found some treasures. We were out and about on a little sojourn away from home, and I’d Googled the local antique stores, in case we had some time to browse. We hit pay dirt - the antique store was in the same strip mall as a gun shop – literally two store-fronts from the antique store’s door. You couldn’t find a happier married couple that day – He slowly browsing guns and knives and ammunition, She lost in aisle after aisle of porcelain, glass, dishware, and crystal. He joined me after he’d ogled some beautiful handguns and sheathed fixed blades, and together we strolled the antique aisle, stopping short in front of a set of exquisite serving pieces, in a creamy white with brown and lavender flower stems, raised little creamy white and pink flowers – there’s really no good way to describe it but let’s just say they’re elegant and meet my (low-maintenance) criteria for having a one-of-a-kind pattern and being in perfect condition. And we both liked them.
That began the occasional procurement of dessert dishes that might go with them – little elegant antique dishes with gold trim that would match but not overwhelm the serving platters. Over time, on various weekends when we decide to browse, we found ourselves looking for such dishes. We’ve found some exquisite ones, and we’ve bought far more than we technically need.
One neighborhood favorite was going out of business, and from them we hauled away the master treasure: 12 white dessert dishes with the slimmest rim of gold on the edge, and a set of six crystal dessert wine glasses with gold etching on the rim, and a fluted crystal wine carafe with – yes – gold etching details that looked like these things had been made for each other.
Together, we’ve created the most astonishing dessert set. Every piece is gorgeous, graceful yet not too feminine, and requires hand washing while holding one’s breath for the extra care required not to damage the gold rims or hand-painted designs.
We need just one more item to complete our assembly, and as yet I’ve not found it. I’ve looked and looked and started to wonder if what I want isn’t even possible. Antique gold flatware – not too heavy, not too tacky or fake looking, not art deco or anything modern – that would blend in with all the other pieces. Every time I head into a store, I check the silverware. And every time I’ve been disappointed.
Now, we come to the part of the story of the woman who is not my friend, but could be. Last week we were on vacation visiting family, and I stopped in my favorite second-hand/antique store – a store that not just sells items from my parents’ and grandparents’ generations, but a few years back sold actual items from my family, when my folks moved out of their raise-the-kids home into a retirement community. This place has GREAT stuff.
I took my son, who, last year, found a glass dolphin, not an antique in any way, but cut nicely, so he has great memories of the store and was excited to see what they might have this time. [Yes, I have the kind of kid you can take into an antique store and not fear he’ll break something. The kind of kid any low maintenance mom would have.]
This time, we strolled in, and I mentioned to my son, not believing it would matter, to be on the lookout for gold silverware. Having a goal sometimes makes being in crowded places easier to navigate. He set off to look for glass figurines, I paused in front of all the delicate sets of china, picking up tiny little hand-painted bowls seeking the Limoges signature underneath. The store was filled with great dish and glass sets, and, of course, lots of things that I can’t imagine anyone would want in their home, let alone think could be sold, but that’s another story.
My mind was captured by a tiny little bowl, small enough to be a finger bowl but nothing more – totally without function, unless you could use it to put your rings in – there was only one, so there was no real use as a fresh salt/pepper dish for a table – really, it seemed to exist only to prove that pretty little fragile things still exist. It made me happy to look at it. It made me consider buying it, especially when I realized it was only $8.00. The only thing that made me reconsider was that I’d have had to get it back home, and it wasn’t the kind of thing that was going to travel or ship well – the porcelain was thin and it barely weighed anything. Even if I could ship it and be confident it would arrive in one piece, the store doesn’t ship. This gorgeous little item with the exact kind of floral pattern I loved would have to remain in the store.
I continued to stroll the aisles, admiring and condemning objects as they met my eye, and even found a bear skin that I was simultaneously repulsed by and drawn to, and I called my son over to see it, since we’d had a bear sighting the prior week while traipsing along a mountain meadow trail. He came back to see it, then headed off again. He called me over to see a glass hummingbird on an amethyst stand, and a companion glass butterfly piece – both were well-crafted and attractive. But for the same reasons the little bowl would have to stay, this curio set would also have to remain. He was disappointed but he understood.
We both continued to stroll.
“Mama,” I heard him call a minute or so later. “I found your silverware!” I followed his excited voice, not sure what he’d found, and carefully planning how to tell him that whatever he’d found was unlikely to be what I was looking for. But it was exactly the right thing – a set of 58 pieces, in a silverware case, of lightweight, attractive, gold cutlery. Eight pieces of everything, plus a sugar spoon and serving pieces. For $30.00. I was intrigued; I was enamored. But my husband wasn’t with me, and there was still the shipping issue - I’d have to get it to a shipping place by 3 pm, that day (it was a Saturday, 1:20 pm and we were supposed to meet my Aunt and Uncle at 2 pm that day for an afternoon of coffee and conversation; the next day was Sunday and the following day we were leaving town before the stores opened). It just seemed like the timing was wrong.
We left the store with nothing. I dropped my son off with my folks, picked up my husband and headed out to visit my aunt and uncle. On the way, I told him about the items we’d seen. “You should have bought them,” he declared, with just the mildest scorn that I’d not instantly snapped up this treasure. “We could have shipped them, no problem.” He was utterly confident in his assessment of the “shippability” of the items. “Let’s go back,” he decried, and his tone was so sure, our plan so clear, we headed right back to the store to pick them up and declare mutual victory.
I headed exactly to the spot, weaving my way to where the silverware box was, only to find it was gone. I backtracked and looked at several other walkways, thinking perhaps I was mistaken in where I thought it was. Then I went up to the sales counter, and saw it – the closed silverware box was sitting on the counter top. And on top of it was the tiny little pretty but impractical porcelain dish. And in front of these was a woman. “Are you buying these?” I asked, in a smaller-than-usual voice. “Yes,” she beamed. She clearly understood the value of these items. She may even have understood that she’d scooped me out of their purchase. Perhaps she’d overheard my son and I enthusiastically extolling them just a mere 20 minutes before, when I was hemming and hawing about buying something before my husband had even seen it, buying something we couldn’t possible take back on the plane, since they don’t even allow plastic silverware on board, wondering if $30 was too much to spend and if we really needed 58 pieces when all I really wanted were 8 dessert forks, 8 dessert spoons, and that perfectly amazing little sugar spoon.
I, who usually have something I can say at any moment, was rendered speechless. She’d bested me. And even if she was spying on my find before I left the store, even if my excitement about the gold silverware sparked her to look at it for the first time after she’d passed by it, there was no explaining the combination of her buying gold cutlery AND the pretty little finger bowl. I hadn’t said a word about that little bowl. I’d kept my covetous thoughts about it to myself. I hadn’t even told my son how marvelous it was. I had stood in front of it, picked it up once or twice, sighed, sure, but put it down and walked away. Never once during my (subdued) outcry at her having taken the only two items in the universe that I wanted did she offer to allow me to buy them instead.
The store must have held 10,000 items. How could she have picked my two favorites?
Hmmmm. I’m back home now, our family vacation is over. I’ve had time to think and think and think about what happened. I regret my second thoughts, my lifetime of self-doubt that did what self-doubt will always do – cause you to act against your own instincts, which is never very helpful, and certainly won’t get you a completed dessert set. I don’t harbor any hard feelings for this woman, who in one brief span, picked up the best items a top-notch second-hand store had to offer. In fact, I wish her well. I hope she enjoys the things as much as I would have. I hope they fit in to her high maintenance sense of needing things to be just so. I hope her mate, if she has one, is as happy with the capture as she is.
And if I lived in that town, I’d want to get to know this woman; I could be friends with her. She has, after all, impeccable taste, and the courage to act more quickly on it. And, sorry to say, because if I’d been her instead of me at the sales counter that day, I wouldn’t give up my trove to someone who missed out by mere minutes either. We are meant for each other. She and I might enjoy other things that seem to be uncommon pleasures in a world of mass-production. And if she invited me over for coffee and dessert, I’d be able to experience the pleasure of using one of her (but could have been mine) lovely little gold folks and spoons. I’d put sugar in whatever she served, whether I wanted it sweetened or not, just for the chance to hold that perfect little sugar spoon. And I could see what kind of dishes she had, and whether they were as fabulous as the ones I’ve found so far. And we’d talk and talk and talk about our lives, which would no doubt have countless areas of overlap. We’d clearly become friends. With one limitation, perhaps: we could never go to second-hand stores together.
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