the estate sale guitar

i bought a guitar at an estate sale today

it’s small, with a shorter scale and it was handmade in mexico and hung on a wall in a beautiful living room with a fireplace and lots of big fancy furniture

i paid $30 for it, counting out a purple ten dollar bill alongside a crumpled green twenty and a handful of change for the other things i purchased:

-an unused leather bound journal

-a bag of beeswax tealight candles that smell like honey and hope

-a chipped fluorite crystal

-a large chunk of raw amethyst

-a small metal plate with seashells on it

the man who brought it back to canada loved music. he was the husband of the woman who died. he died before her. his photo is stuffed inside the guitar.

i hear whispers about an ambulance and then the house was empty, neighbors come to paw through her things and offer $5 for a lamp or $10 for a stack of old photo frames.

i don’t need another guitar, i have several already. when the mood is right and i’m feeling a little bit like my aging hands need to play some classical music, i pick up my instrument and make music again, mostly for the lazy enjoyment of my cats.

i don’t need another one. but i buy one anyways. and i go home to my room and make music and write and take photos and think.

one day someone will be buying the guitars off the wall at my estate sale or pawing through my things – drawers of crystals and gold jewelry, books and old photos, all the antiques i treasured.

estate sales make me pensive. i think about death and guitars and the inside of stranger’s houses and stripped mattresses and family photos in the garbage. i think about cleaning supplies and when i had to clean out my uncle’s things after he died.

he was a criminal and schizophrenic, but he had always been kind to me.

i kept two things that belonged to my uncle – a rock and this copper tray he made in a high school art class. i think about those things sometimes – how delusions and paranoia could be laid away in order to cut and hammer a beautiful vessel. you wouldn’t think by looking at it, that the person who made it was crazy and spent time in psych wards and prisons.

i wonder about the rock. it’s this strange twisted specimen and i don’t understand it or why it was kept, but it was and now i keep it on my vanity where i keep an alligator’s head and some taxidermied starlings and a victorian perfume bottle like the one from the 1993 film “the secret garden”.

i wonder about the estate sale lady’s crystals. did she like crystals for their beauty or their supposed metaphysical properties? why did she keep the broken fluorite? what did she see in it? did she see anything at all?

i wonder if someday someone will wonder about me.

i wonder if my perfume bottles and paintings and bibles and guitars will be held like i held them?