On Gnawings and Scratches and Frays

Shiny and new is maybe problematic. It’s too perfect. It smacks of acquisition and little else—just the money you threw away. No distinguishing your piece from all the other very same ones in the store. Whereas worn and old—that’s something else entirely.

There’s mystery. I don’t know who chewed on the rung of one of our kitchen chairs. Hardly a child, I think—it’s the upper rung, about an exact dog’s-face height. Having held who-know’s-whose bottoms, surely multitudes’, as we got it from the ancestors, now the chair is even more a cause for wonderment.

There’s history. Say, our bed. Marilyn—a neighbor from back when—knew I loved the oldies in her upstairs, and one day, up our road she came in her pickup, her mother along and the glorious black thing in back.

“This is absurd,” muttered Paulson later that day, friends gone, when we tried to lower our old bedsprings down onto the sidebars and it fell through instead. “What was wrong with our old bed? Now we’ll have that to get rid of.” We couldn’t finish setting up Marilyn’s till way late, so around midnight there he was, out in the shop, running his radial arm saw, ripping boards for slats to hold up the springs.

He’d had to stick blocks under the legs to keep them from scratching the floor, and now the slats, when he brought them upstairs, made the bed even higher. We almost needed a ladder, like in a medieval castle, to finally get in and sleep.

There’s love. The blue-and-green-fake-stones shoes I brought home from the thrift shop? Somebody else, in her infatuation, wore them almost to death. I get to cherish them now, finishing them off.

The one thing that utterly defies this shiny-and-new-and-not-as-precious philosophy is a baby. Babies aren’t acquisitions. They’re the freshest loveliest belongings ever. That’s maybe why we fail to see, more often than not, our mottles and scuffs and wrinkles’ splendor. It’s hard to think of ourselves as pleasingly bang-up shabby instead of ravaged by time. I wish I could make that mental adjustment.