A Door Knock - Part Seven

A Door Knock

Part Seven

            “Vanished”.

            “Too”.

            The clock vanished too.

            NOT that I was wondering about THAT when I turned toward Nathan …in the bedroom… with the “still mental image glazed over” state.

            Let us remind.  At this “when I turned” moment I had …been in the old house with Nathan and the unfolding current state of affairs… about thirty-five minutes… including the snuff-bottle-in-the-cellar foray.  I was past the downstairs desk, owned the old table, found the snuff bottle, lost that bottle, climbed the front stairs, gone to the first bedroom and “lost” a colonial secretary that I never saw and …did… back at the very beginning of the thirty-five minutes… when I entered the home… “SEE” that the old tall clock at the end of the front hall “was gone” “Huh”.

            I never saw the clock again.  I never looked at the clock ever.  I never got within twelve feet in the hallway darkness NEAR the old clock… back there… in it’s “obviously old” dark finish.  I figured, as I courted the old lady, I’d “get to it” “soon enough” and that “OBVIOUSLY” it was “not for sale”.  NOW it was “gone”.

            Vanished.

            AFTER I finished my supervised by the constant companionship of Nathan …house tour… that I am taking a descriptive tangent from here… I DID broach a “What happened to the clock?”

            “It didn’t work.”

            “Right.  What  happened to it?”

            “The auctioneer took it.”

            “Selling it.”

            “No.  It didn’t work.”

            “Right.  He’s going to auction it?”

            “No.  It didn’t work.”

            “Right;  They NEVER work.  They’re OLD.”

            “Yes but this one COULD be FIXED.”

            “Oh.”

            “We didn’t want to pay for that.”

            “To fix it?”

            “Yes.  It wouldn’t sell for much if it didn’t WORK.”

            “Sell at auction?”

            “Yes.  So he had a clock repair man look at it.”

            “The movement?”

            “Look at the clock.  To see if it could be fixed”.

            “The movement?  The clock works?”

            “Yes.  He took those out of the clock.  That clock was just a big BOX with the clock sitting on top.  It had a box that slid off at the top.  Like a helmet.  A football helmet.”

            “The bonnet.”

            “It covered the clock.  He took that off and lifted off the clock”.

            “Oh.”

            “He took the clock to the repair man to look at it.  He said it would cost a lot to fix it.  That man he said would buy it and fix it if we didn’t want to do that.”

            “He’d buy the clock?”

            “And fix it.”

            “How much would he pay?”

            “He said eight hundred and fifty dollars the way it was.”

            “To buy it or fix it?”

            “To buy it.  It would cost over two thousand dollars to fix it he said”.

            “So what did you do?”

            “We sold it”

            “Whose we?”

            “My wife and I.”

            “You sold the old clock for eight hundred and fifty dollars?”

            “Actually eight hundred in the end.  It was missing some parts too.”

            “Missing parts?”

            “That’s what they said.”

            “The auctioneer?”

            “And the clock guy”.

            “Do you know anything about the clock?”

            “About it?  It was old and always been there.”

            “Right.”

            “It didn’t work.  It never worked”.

            “Right.  So you’ve SOLD that?”

            “Oh yeah.”

            “I never looked at it.”

            “It?”

            “The clock”.

            “It didn’t work.”

           

            It vanished.

            Too.

            What else vanished?

            “Too”.

            What else was IN THERE (the old house) TO vanish?

            “Too.”

            As one black hole in the universe of this old house opened before me to swallow another black hole… a loom of a final largest black hole swallowing all …had taken place… and I… “didn’t know it yet”.  It was over two weeks later that I discovered this largest black hole and that discovery came after the weeks of I not considering that black hole as “probable”. 

            As the secretary appeared and vanished and as… the clock vanished I… WHILE IN THE HOUSE …and for weeks later… commonly understood to myself that I “could find all this” meaning that once I left the house I could track down the auctioneer, the auction of the old house’s contents, find “Mackey” and …well… I could actually GO to HIS ‘store’ RIGHT?.  That is, using my in-the-trade skills, I could “get on top of all this” and “put it (this estate) away”.  And I set out to do this right away and… got nowhere.

            “No Mackey” that I can find.  Mackey, at the best, is a friend of someone who is a friend of someone who is a dealer …maybe… and… maybe they go to flea markets and “sell”?  But I doubt it.  I think …THINK… that what “Mackey” ‘got’; bought… has been either sold as a block to an in the local neighborhood (read ‘in the hood’) VERY small time dealer who… put it all in his spare garage bay and is still figuring out what to do with it OR… this is what Mackey HIMSELF has done.  In the end… and after “looking everything up” (“researching”) “on the internet”, the someone will make a move with the stuff due to storage pressure and ‘cost’.  “COSTS” actually.  THEN, and only then will the black hole in the universe of that block of ‘old stuff’ ‘from that house’ be exposed to where a someone such as myself COULD… should I actually know about its emergence on the market… find it (the lot) and pick through it for unnoticed treasure.  I, again… have yet to find “Mackey”.  That lot COULD STILL BE “stored intact” “somewhere”.

            The black hole of the clock is …concise.  SOMEONE owns that, HAS IT… probably in the front hall of THEIR house and… it probably still “didn’t work”.  Someone… after paying the eight hundred dollars estate price and then ‘paying commissions’ to the ‘finders’… knows exactly what they have.  What they have is probably a fifteen to twenty thousand dollar AND UP ‘old clock’ that will, after a studious rest period… travel in the market as “from an old house in Maine; someone found it twenty years ago”.

            “Great surface” will be said.

            “It doesn’t work” will never be said.  THEY NEVER WORK.  And real antique clock collectors “never run them” (make them ‘work’; go tick-tock).

            That left the ‘auctioneer’.  And two features there.  First:  Is it ‘an auctioneer’ meaning is this a one man who has a one auction with this one lot of antiques from an ‘old house in Maine’.  Or… is it ‘an auctioneer’ who is set up like a guy with a board on top of a barrel on a street corner “down by the docks” who has three walnut shells set on that board with a bean under one of them and …YOU… can BET on which shell that bean is under… and LOOSE.  Following the bean under a shell of “antiques from an old house in Maine” gets very hard when ‘the stuff’ ‘leaves the state’.  But I did it.  I found a street corner with a guy with a shell game... on a board… on a barrel.  It had stuff from a house in Maine.  It had what …looked like… in the advertised auction listing… the desk from the front room.  It had the early secretary with its original ball feet …in the drawer (?).  It had other old things that …could have been in an old house in Maine.  I looked very hard at the ad after I found it.  There was a problem.

            The problem was that… the ad for the auction I eventually found… was for an auction that had taken place OVER TWO MONTHS BEFORE… I was in the house with Nathan.  That hadn’t occurred to me; that the auction, like the sale of the clock, were… done deals… months in the past.  SINCE I was looking for an ‘upcoming’ auction, it was two weeks before I stumbled on the idea of that auction already having taken place and …stumbled backwards in time to find a “SEEMS to be THE AUCTION”.  With all the power of the internets these days to “keep” “everything” “forever”, a BLACK HOLE in that is the retention of …street corner auctioneer’s auction listings, notices and sale results for ‘past’ ‘auctions’.  That black hole of stored data IS BLACK DARKNESS unless the auctioneer ‘keeps it up’ which… they don’t.  Anyway:  I was months late to “that auction”.

            I was months late PERIOD.  While I “went back” to the …the reason the path was shoveled to the street is so the auctioneer and Mackey could LOAD “stuff” from the old house for WEEKS while NATHAN …and his wife… brokered it ALL and so:  When I was finally glazed over and looking back to Nathan up there in that front bedroom HE had already sold and BEEN PAID for all of the contents of the old house MONTHS BEFORE.  I thought this was a “just happening now”?  I don’t know WHAT I thought because I couldn’t THOUGHT anything because I was “glazed over” by my mental creation of the secretary.

            Where’s that now?  THE SAME PLACE AS THE CLOCK:  A someone has THAT all paid off and collected in THEIR upstairs bedroom now and in a ‘little while’ it will travel into the market as ‘found in an old house in Maine’ “twenty years ago”.