November 2, 2003
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A Tale of Three Tables
Some fifteen years ago, I left a cushy sinecure and a comfy townhouse apartment in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to live in Willow, Alaska. Despite Kathy’s (aka SuSu’s) help, the move was roughly as organized as Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. And what with my undiagnosed and untreated NPD (narcissistic personality disorder), raging addictions to alcohol, Xanax, and pot, and general fearfulness and lunacy, not nearly as well thought-out.. Items I flat-out abandoned included a 100% wool, 10×18 foot carpet. I don’t even want to think about what I gave away or sold for cheap. But I digress.
I sometimes am bemused at what survived the trip. For instance, this red apron I got when I worked at a local fast food chicken joint about 30 years ago is still hanging around, can’t remember the last time I wore the darn thing. A tweed Norfolk jacket I got when I was in 8th grade is still hanging in the closet of the 19-foot travel trailer I used to live in. I outgrew it more than a few years ago. I still have a pair of Weejun loafers I got maybe 20 years ago and stopped wearing when I noticed that the soles had worn to paper-thickness. But what started this thing was the set of tables I got, oh, maybe 20 years ago.
I used to do my furniture-shopping at N.B. Leibman’s, a discount place on the Carlisle Pike, an amazingly ugly strip across the river from Harrisburg, PA. It was zoned for whatever–there were big discount stores, gas stations, little antique shops, a drive-in theatre cum flea market, and residences, all sitting cheek-by-jowl. Liebman’s was cheap and they let you browse undisturbed, which I liked.
The titular end tables, a set of three of graduated sizes which sort of nested, had pressboard tops and lathe-turned legs of some unidentified cheap wood, stained a sort of sickly maple hue. They screwed into the tops. I have no idea why I bought them in the first place, as my taste at the time ran more towards glass-topped dining room tables and velveteen sofas and king-size beds and elaborate stereo systems. I am one of those idiots who will buy almost anything if it is cheap enough, so I can only assume they were on sale, probably for less than $20. But boy, have they come in handy over the years.
I assume they made it up here in the first place because one, they disassemble into something just larger than an attache case and two, they are practically indestructable. As I recall, two of them flanked the old hunk of sectional sofa at the old place, an 8×35 foot trailer wih attached mud room that SuSu referred to with her usual accuracy as “a squalid hovel.”
Some thirteen years ago, before I had my stand up and running and $10,000 a year seemed like big money, the Girdwood Forest Fair provided most of our income for the month of July. We each did psychic readings in a medieval-style pavillion that Kathy made by hand out of dyed bed sheets and shower curtain rings and aluminum tubing scrounged from dumpsters. Right now, it is stored in the old schoolbus that once served as a restuarant, and is either still usable or molded beyond recognition–the recent warm wet winters have raised hell with a lot of things we had stored in the bus. But I digress. Again.
At some point, we added a retail side to Girdwood, and I hawked crystals, and jewelry she had made, in between doing readings. I seem to to recall that at lest one of the tables had been going with us before, serving as a side table to hold stuff like incense and other window-dressing. When we added the retail side, all three were pressed into service. At first it seemed odd to me, packing up the household furnishings for what was essentially a camping trip that supported us, but I got used to it.
We also used them at the Talkeetna Bluegrass festival, a misnomer if ever there was one. Hard rock dominated it so much that it bacame a stop on the world-wide Deadheads’ tour, and we called it the Talkeetna Blow Grass Festival. It was arguably the most drug-soaked gathering since Woodstock, only with cocaine and shrooms instead of brown acid. Having bikers as security (“Karma Kontrol” said their red t-shirts) only added to the fun.
The TBF deserves several blogs all to itself, but I can’t resist adding one quick anecdote now. Back in those days, we sold everything from kittens to pot-laced fruit bars to vitamins to crystals to knives and whips and cat’o nine tails. (Cats’ o nine tails?) Anyway, the event gets wilder and wilder as the week progresses, climaxing Saturday night. We stayed open late, rigging up a propane light for illumination. Late one Saturday night, this brazen-looking buxom blonde came with her guy in tow, sized up a cat’o nine tails, and bought it. Eyeing her guy, she said “We’re gonna have fun tonight!” The look on the guy’s face–a mixture of chagrin, fear, and concupiscence–was priceless.
For the last few years, in our more comfortable digs in a newer and bigger trailer that is on the power line, we only used two of the tables, the other one languishing at the old place. But a few weekends ago, we worked the Raven Hall bazaar, held on the state fairgrounds–the biggest event I had ever worked, what with 121 vendor spaces, mass media promotion, the whole nine yards. So I went over to the old place and got the third table and the thre of them, along with five card tables, went along with us to the Raven Hall event. It was a big success, even though veterans told us that sales and crowds were down from previous years. We both worked our respective butts off, Kathy doing the hard work of organizing and putting together the displays and fitting an amazing number of knves into a relatively small space, and I went into full-fledged Turkish rug merchant mode for hours despite a debilitating viral infection, as Kathy mentioned in a previous blog.
It is over now, and we are on the mailing list for next year, when WE will be veterans. And the three little tables are here together once more–one serving as a side table for me, another holding a crate that holds magazines and various wholesale catalogs and a really neat table lamp, and the third just sort of hovering near the middle of the living room, its ultimate fate still to be manifested on this plane.
Comments (2)
Let’s see, first, a long long time ago there were the 3 little pigs; then there was Goldilocks and the three bears; and now this, Armsmerchant and the three magic tables. The tradition remains unbroken, along with the tables.
The cats have their own ideas about the ultimate fate of that third table. I’ve seen each of them in turn, resting on it in front of the woodstove, watching the flickering flames.
…and Girdwood: there was always a “retail” side to it, long before you joined up. At the first ones, I sold plants in recycled containers. About every second year, whenever I hadn’t fallen victim to a crop failure or a ripoff, there were fruit bars. Doug started selling kittens when he was six years old. When my Gypsy friends joined me one year, they sold the crystals that they wrapped in dental floss and added to the bead-strands they strung. Before we had your tables, I used to take apart my “tinkertoy” bookshelves and take them along to furnish the booth.