A turn of phrase crossed my radar again last night. It took a long time for it to sink into my head that thrift shops and second-hand stores are little more than treadmills for the former possessions of the dead. The slide below, like most of the thousands of such items I scanned and posted to sorabji.com, probably came to me via pickers, those death-circling capitalists who swoop in on abandoned storage lockers and unexpected deaths to make a buck or two off the unclaimed possessions of the deceased.
Source: AMATEUR SLIDE 30062
This slide appears to be from the 1970s. At a glance I see dynamic between these two children that resembles how my sister and I used to interact. I see a similar age gap of about five years, and I remember being pushed around in a Kiddy Kar not unlike this one, though mine was a bit larger. Unlike this kid’s car mine was not a moneymobile. The dollar sign, why is it there? The kids in this picture are probably about the same ages as my sister and me. Where are these people now? Who the hell knows? But if pictures like this of my sister and I surfaced on some random website I do not know how I would feel knowing my personal legacy had been hijacked by someone else in the interest of randomness or abstract sharing of something to which they had no connection except that it turned up for sale at a thrift shop.
