Peddlers

Email from my great-uncle:

Date: Tuesday, February 19, 2013 at 11:20 a.m.

Subject: PEDDLER

DEAR ZOE—

IT WAS GOOD TO HEAR from you. No, I don’t have any articles about peddlers. There are all kinds of peddlers—just a few of them for you are fruit peddlers and junk peddlers. But that’s a good idea for an article.

Stay well—Uncle Neil

My father buys records, stereo equipment, and collectibles at estate sales. He peddles these wares out of a ’96 Toyota station wagon, tracking sales, expenditures, and gas mileage in a small ledger he keeps in the glove box along with a spare harmonica. When he wins a bid on a collection of records or accumulates a few boxes, he chooses those he can’t bear to part with and then goes through a meticulous chain of dispersal. Before I left home, I liked to keep him company.

First stop is the righteous Luke at Bullseye Records who gets first pick and pays a fair price. Then, if Luke passes on anything special, say an Elvis 45 with a picture sleeve, off we go to the crotchety old-timers at Musical Memories. They are a more specialized customer, but my dad knows their tastes. Next, the belligerent and bearded hipsters at Exclusive Company get to thumb through whatever is left. They are too young to recognize my dad as anyone other than the guy who brings in records once a week. They take a lot of the garbage off our hands, but they don’t pay shit.

If anything is left at this point it goes to Half-Price Books where the pennies are hardly worth the gas it took to get there, but we go anyway because it still feels like turning nothing into something. If this is an illusion then it is a nourishing one. They take their time at Half-Price, which means we have to find something to do while we wait. In the summer it is usually possible to sniff out a nearby garage sale. When my dad spots a sign in the distance, it is my job to get a good look at the address. If I can get the address, or even just the street name, he’ll find a way to get us there. He used to be a courier, which means that he navigates like a professional and drives like a maniac. It also means that he plays the harmonica at stoplights.

In winter there are no garage sales and the waiting is harder. Once, at a Half-Price in a strip mall, we sat in the station wagon while the girl in the store checked for scratches on the vinyl. Pulling the ledger from the glove box, my dad calculated the day’s victories and losses, plugging numbers into the equation that decodes our day into meaning, into red or black. With his free hand he held the harmonica in place between his lips, the vibration of the instrument filling and warming the car. I wrote down a few notes of my own.

Types of peddlers:

1. a. Fruit

2. b. Junk

3. c. Music

4. d. Memory

I no longer live in Wisconsin, land of crotchety old-timers and nourishing illusions. When my partner Tyler gets into a master’s program for creative writing we decide to move to the upper-northwest corner of the country. We choose this place because we like the look of it on a map. I read that it is a temperate rain forest. I’m not quite sure what this means, but I picture thick moss, lush vegetation, ancient cinnamon-colored trees. When we embark on the journey, we feel like pioneers setting out for a new world. We tell each other that we can be whatever we want in Washington.

My great-great-grandfather was a ragman. No one seems to remember his name. A peddler by trade, and I imagine by spirit, he came from Russia on a wooden ship only to drive a horse-drawn wooden cart. He rode through midwestern towns collecting rags and paper, which he would then trade...