Christmas is coming, so I've been scanning Ebay for stuff that I don't know what it is.
You see, my dad loves nothing better than to pick up cheap, weird old things.
Merchandise, I mean. It's not like he's out there luring elderly ladies in vulture hats at flea markets, or anything...
(They'd be more than fifty-cents.)
But for the Pop, the more bizarre the item is, the more quickly it needs to come home with him. Particularly, if it's cheap. In fact, if he finds something in a quarter box of junk that he absolutely has no clue what it could be? Why, it provides hours of quality entertainment!
Like this thing. Now, on first glance, you'd think it was a paper towel holder right?...
But what's up with the row of clips at the bottom, and the holes at the top? Not quite right for restaurant order slips... Too small to hold rubber stamps... So, no idea! It's been a cipher for two years now, and he isn't using it for anything...
But, oh, how he loves to admire its brushed steel finish!
Now this jobbie-- a candy dish? nut-dish? a business card holder? something for coins?--it's another fave.
Is it a cat? A monkey? And why does it have the legs of a Vegas showgirl?
You'd have thought my dad had found ancient Egyptian treasure when he came across it, such was his unbridled joy.
All of Thanksgiving, where other families sit around mesmerized by the Macy's parade, glued to football, or just sleeping off the tryptafan-- not us. Nope, we were on Ebay, as Dad honed his keen search skillz, trying to find anything remotely similar to Leggy-Monkey-Cat Butler-- as I like to call it. Anything that might offer a clue to the origins of his glorious prize.
Now, the artwork below was another Dad-find. Part carving... part bedpost... part, er... scary wooden cudgel...? Amusingly, there's a sticker on the bottom of it that reads, "Cowboy."
I understand that art, to an artist, is all about personal interpretation. All I know is, this is not how I personally view John Wayne-- even in his waning years. If a cowboy at all, it's possibly Bubba Ho-Tep. But I somehow think the Pop won't appreciate the comparison of a b-movie horror fiend to his fine $5 folk art.
I like to put it facing the wall when I visit.
Over the years, Dad has accumulated:
- Electronic mystery meters printed in foreign languages...
- Gadgets designed to open items lost to the sands of time...
- Tools that swivel and ratchet and ding for reasons known only to innovators long-dead...
Dad says all of this will be mine someday.
And I tell him how I hope he leads a long, long, happy, healthy life. A long, long life. Really long.
Long.
Of course, some of this is mine now-- as Dad's taste for the unknown ends up having a natural runoff to me when my birthday and Christmas come around.
Each year, I ask that he not trouble himself with these gift-giving occasions. I know it's not easy, and I really don't need anything. I've given him a guilt-free pass to simply forgo the events.
But he insists.
Last year, I received a number of flat porcelain disks, with metal threading in the back of each one. Too flat to be drawer knobs and at the wrong angle for brass bed accents, I opened the box as Dad said beaming,
"I don't know what these are. But there are a lot of them."
Ah. Things like this make being specific in my thank you notes a little challenging. "Thank you for the Christmas mystery disks. I will use them for... something... once I figure out how they work, or what I can fasten them to."
The same Christmas I also received a silver snuff spoon. (No home should be without.)
This item I got for my birthday. I know what it is in theory, but...
It certainly is... different. It's a small mirror made of leather. And metal. And has a carved bone handle. The handle seems to be a dragon or possibly a snake. And, of course, there's our friend Mr. Hoot Owl on the back, with beaded eyes.
I make sure never to read aloud from any old books-- particularly anything in Latin-- around it, lest I inadvertently open up some portal to a heretofore uncontacted level of Hell.This is my irrational fear. And I'm comfortable with that.
So, back to Ebay... I've been thinking that the perfect way of making my dad very happy for Christmas is to find the unknown.... the mysterious... the questionable... and gift them.
Just think of the hours of fun he can have on Christmas morning, opening up packages of the unfathomable and then researching them online!
And you'd be surprised just how many people on Ebay are selling things with search terms like "what is it?", "don't know what it is" or "do you know what it is?"
Why, there's a whole slew of folks out there making money off selling unidentified found objects. And that's nice to know. Because, again, someday all of this will be mine.
Oh, goody.
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