For the last 40 years, my family’s business has been the buying and selling of stuff. We like to call ourselves antique dealers, but the vast majority of our wares is neither old enough nor appealing enough to be classified by anyone as antique. Our family has been active dealers at antique shows and flea markets all throughout Northern California since my grandma and mother started picking through garage sale dollar bins 43 years ago. When I was born, I was quickly recruited to unpack boxes of household glassware at Denio’s Farmers Market. On the way to the show every Sunday, just before dawn, my Mom, Grandma, Grandpa, and I pit stopped at AM PM for coffee, which was a necessary liquid kick in the ass to motivate us to work at five in the morning. Those early morning coffee runs gave me a headstart over my kindergarten classmates on learning about the joys of coffee while also giving me a head start on dental decay.
Growing up surrounded by the buying and selling of stuff led me to believe that items have inherent value, and that being successful means owning a mountainous amount of unique and noteworthy items, like my Grandma did. Naturally, I wanted to be successful, so I became a collector of whatever interested me. My family’s obsession with stuff was a privilege; I could leverage off of their experience to improve the quality and uniqueness of my loot. I had far too many beanie babies displayed in my room, whose hundreds of unblinking beady eyes often kept me wide awake at night. I had every toy, video game console, and Lego brick that a young boy could possibly hope for. My favorite oddity that I found, and still own, is a taxidermy of two frogs standing on their hind legs and playing pool.
As the antique business grew in 2011, my grandma’s collection of furniture, dishware, figurines, dolls, fake plants, toys, train sets, paintings, lamps, books, manikins, glassware, collectible cups, chandeliers, sports cards, comic books, magazines, taxidermies, knives, guns, vintage hats, jewelry, and six and a half foot tall one-armed Jar Jar Binks statue occupied the space of a 5,000 square-foot a warehouse converted storefront, her house, and four 5×10-foot storage lockers. In 2014, my father started getting into the business and my parent’s collection of glassware, furniture, clothes, vintage shaving equipment, and vintage tobacco pipes soon threatened to outgrow our household. The collection became a major contributing factor to my family moving to a larger home.
My pile of stuff blossomed alongside my family’s. I had collectible Sacramento Kings memorabilia including flags, coins, bobbleheads and an autographed basketball. I once expressed an interest in a Star Wars-themed Mr. Potato Head so naturally my mother bought me everything that said Mr. Potato Head on it for the next five years. Because I was heavily involved in the Cub Scouts as a child, I had accrued a variety of memorabilia Eventually, my dresser became practically unusable, filled to the brim with a variety of clothes that I never wore.
As I entered college, I started to get fed up with the family business and the associated lifestyle. In 2014, our business started to shift away from the storefront and into running estate sales. For the uninitiated, estate sales are like extravagant yard sales, where everything in the house is up for grabs. In a typical sale, whomever owns the house passes away, their family doesn’t know what to do with all of their stuff, and they go on to hire companies like ours to run estate sales and sell everything for them.
The first day when preparing for a sale, we walk through the house which is at that point preserved like a museum of somebodies life. But we aren’t there to appreciate what that person had accomplished in their time or what unique experiences they had. We are only there to sell their stuff. We loot their life’s museum, only hoping to find items of value for our personal benefit. I often discover what month and year the person died in, because they have a calendar flipped open to August 2015. My grandma and grandpa are reaching the age where an estate sale of their own could be just around the corner, so the tables will be turned. Nobody will care about the people my grandfather has met around the world using his HAM radio equipment, they will just buy his radio receiver to resell on Ebay for a small profit. My grandma’s endless time and effort dedicating to helping those she loves won’t even be known by the customers, who only care about getting the best deal on her gold necklace.
One time, I made the mistake of getting attached to a recently deceased man who’d house we were turning inside out, looking for anything valuable (there wasn’t). We were dumping his clothes from his dresser into a garbage bag when I came across a small diary. The first entry was from the week after his wife died, in 1998. In that journal, he wrote about his loneliness and hopelessness all the way up until June 2014, where his last entry recited the banal log of his day. I was reading it, standing in his house, surrounded by all of his stuff organized on tables for sale in September 2014, only 3 months after his passing. I knew that his items wouldn’t be remembered, but I could carry on the memory of his life experiences. To this day, I still own a picture of a young man, smiling in with his giant M60 automatic machine gun with the Vietnam jungle and a helicopter patiently awaiting his arrival in the background. On the back side of the picture, written in his handwriting that I instantly recognized from the journal, was the single word “me”.
By 2015, I felt trapped underneath the piles and piles of stuff that confined me in all aspects of my life. Luckily, through the family business, I had a direct and effortless procedure to get rid of most of my clothes, potato heads, and all of my Kings memorabilia and personal Cub Scout artifacts. Becoming minimalist was my silent rebellion against my family and their hyper-consumerist lifestyle. I couldn’t stand being surrounded by stuff at work and at home, so I’ve always got my de-cluttered room as a safe haven after a full day of moving and organizing somebody else’s junk.
I no longer believe that success is directly correlated to the amount of stuff I have. My stuff isn’t how people will remember me, or how to enjoy the time that I have in life. I’ve received a twisted, firsthand lesson in how little importance items are in one’s life, and it has helped strengthen my belief in the importance of enjoyable, unique experiences with the people you care about. And while you are having these experiences, you don’t need to buy endless souvenirs to commemorate the trip, spend the potential shopping time relishing in your enjoyment of that experience. As Abraham Lincoln once said “In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”
Article By Taylor Kalsey
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