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Episode show notes
Credits
Host: Maggie Blaha
Theme music: “Thanks for the Memory” written by Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger, performed by Bob Hope and Shirley Ross in the 1938 film of the same name
Background music: Night In Venice by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5763-night-in-venice
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Personalia: n. Personal allusions, belongings, writings, information, etc.
This episode is titled Personalia, because it examines what a person’s belongings convey about them. Maggie talks with Brooke again—who you might remember from the season 3 premiere episode about her love of estate sales. What Brooke likes most about estate sales is being able to see a person’s stuff in the context of their home, which helps give you a sense of what the person—who is usually dead—was like.
But Brooke also makes a very interesting point about estate sales: They seem to be a natural part of the human circle of life. We all own things, something needs to be done with those things when we’re gone. Brooke’s responses help Maggie examine loss she’s experienced in her own life, and how stuff often acts as a stand-in for the people who have left us.
You can follow Thrift: What Your Garage Sale Says About You a few different places across the internet:
On Facebook & Instagram @thriftpodcast
Sign up for the newsletter at https://thriftpodcast.substack.com to receive show notes and extra content related to the podcast. You can also become a paid subscriber to receive even more bonus content, plus early access to new episodes.
Lastly, my online thrift store is live, and I’m slowly adding more items as I get them. You can find the Thrift Online Shop on Poshmark at the handle @thrift_podcast. You’ll also find updates about the store on Facebook at @thriftpodcastshop and on Instagram @thriftpodcaststore.
Thanks for listening!
Episode transcript
*Note about the transcript: Em dashes (‘—’) have been used to indicate when a speaker doesn’t finish a thought or when the conversation between 2 speakers overlaps. [Punctuation decision inspired by Greta Gerwig.]
[OPENING - CLIP BEGINS]
Brooke: This is just my distinction, but to me estate sales are more often about kind of getting to see the inside of the house itself, which is honestly a big part of the appeal. And a lot of times an estate sale happens because someone’s died or a family has to move for some reason. So it’s generally something that happens indoors and it’s kind of “everything must go.” But yard sales are more outside and tend to be a little, like, a smaller selection of stuff and, I don’t know, when I see a yard sale I don’t typically think that someone has definitely died, but with estate sales that’s kind of where your mind goes.
[CLIP ENDS]
[INTRODUCTION]
Maggie: You’re listening to Thrift: What Your Garage Sale Says About You, a podcast that explores how we can all be more community-minded citizens through thrifting.
[THEME MUSIC, 30 SECONDS]
Maggie: I’m Maggie Blaha, your host as always, and for this episode I wanted to talk more about estate sales with Brooke, who you heard in the opening clip. You might also remember Brooke, who lives in Atlanta, GA, from this season’s premiere episode. Here’s a clip from that episode to remind you.
[CLIP BEGINS]
Brooke: I mean all the ones I’ve been to, which has only been 3, have been very clear about masks being mandatory, distancing being required, only a certain number of people allowed in the home, and not being able to pay with cash, stuff like that. I’ll usually also bring an extra pair of gloves just to be extra careful.
But I do worry, and the last couple we’ve been to have felt safe in the exact same ways, we’ve had masks and all that stuff. But I just, in some ways, wonder if it’s me wanting it to be safe rather than truly knowing that it can be 100% safe.
[CLIP ENDS]
Maggie: In that premiere episode Brooke was specifically talking about going to estate sales in the age of COVID-19, but in this episode I want to expand on an interesting point she made in our interview over the summer: that estate sales seems to be a natural part of the circle of human life.
One of the first questions I asked Brooke was whether she thinks there’s a difference between estate sales and yard sales, and what she finds so appealing about estate sales.
[CLIP BEGINS]
Brooke: Seeing their house. I love it when there’s an estate sale listing for a house you’ve driven by a bunch and just think it’s really neat and cool. I think as I’ve gotten older that’s become more of the appeal. When I was a kid it was just like, ‘why are we going into these other houses?’ Now it is really kind of interesting to see these full, enormous mansions. Or, to see a house that looks pretty small from the street, but then you get in it, and it’s like huge and has a bunch of interesting stuff in it.
In the last few years—not that I’m elderly or anything—but you know as you get older you think more about death and you see family go through it and think more about it. You would definitely get clues about who the person was based on what was for sale. A lot of times in offices you’ll find work documents, or documents from volunteer work they did or school, and it kind of helps you paint a picture of who the person was.
Like there was a woman at an estate sale a couple weeks ago— I mean, she wasn’t there because I assume she was dead. She was like a Jewish radiologist who really had a thing for costume jewelry, and her husband had this enormous woodshop in the basement of this really interesting house up in Chamblee, so you just wonder what an interesting couple they must have been. Like they had some posters of art festivals in the 80s and 90s, so you just kind of get a sense of who they are in a way that’s a little bittersweet because usually by the time you’re there they’re gone.
[CLIP ENDS]
Maggie: I came across the word personalia the other day. It’s from North America and the mid 19th century, and it means “personal allusions, belongings, writings, information.” I like thinking of stuff as a personal allusion, as objects that stand in and remind us of the person they belonged to.
I’ve been reading Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia, a collection of letters and interviews from the famously anonymous Italian author that give readers an insight into Ferrante’s journey as a writer. In every interview included in the book, which took the form of written Q&A exchanges, the interviewer would ask why Ferrante decided not to become a public personage. “Why won’t you tell us who you are?” every interviewer demands. Ferrante always replies that she has already told us everything we need to know about who she is in her work.
Ferrante doesn’t mean that there’s some great mystery for us to solve, that she’s left clues about her true identity in everything she’s written. The writer puts it this way: “When one offers oneself to the public as a pure and simple act of writing—the only thing that really counts in literature—that self becomes inextricably part of the story or the verse, part of the fiction.” Put even more simply, we place too much attention on the author as someone who exists outside of the work, rather than the work itself.
I’ll admit that it’s a little upsetting that there may never be an Elena Ferrante writer’s house that I can make a pilgrimage to. We’ll likely never even know when the woman who is Elena Ferrante dies; her writing will just cease for good.
For a writer, their name even becomes a personal allusion. If Ferrante continues to succeed with concealing her identity, her name will only ever remind us of her work.
Brooke’s visit to an estate sale in Chamblee, Georgia, left her feeling bittersweet. Bittersweet because, as a stranger at an estate sale, you’re left only with a person’s belongings and a space to fill with your impression of who that person was in life. This empty space is actually what makes you feel like you know the person, what makes you feel close to them. Even though the stuff they left behind is as close as you’ll ever get.
This seems to be what frustrates members of the media who want to write profiles about Ferrante. They want to feel like they know who the real Elena Ferrante is, they want a tweet or photo to latch onto. Instead of reading the writer’s work very closely, they’d rather dig up personal details to fill the space Ferrante leaves.
I love this response that Elena Ferrante gave to an interviewer from a Brazilian publication’s question about who she is when she’s not writing:
“Ferrante: Someone who always carries a book and a notebook in her purse as she goes about her daily life.”
[CLIP BEGINS]
Brooke: I guess in some ways the estate sale feels like part of the circle of life. Now that they’re gone, their stuff must disseminate and doesn’t need to get dumped in a landfill. So I guess the estate sale just feels like part of that process.
I know when my mom died we had a yard sale to get rid of a lot of her stuff and it was more of an emotional undertaking than I anticipated, which of course is stupid like of course it was going to be emotional.
And, ultimately, I don’t even really remember how much we sold versus how much we ended up just taking to Goodwill. It felt like part of the steps you take after you lose someone. They still have stuff, and it’s good stuff, it’s not necessarily stuff that needs to get thrown away. And they enjoyed it, so you want it to go to other people that might.
Maggie: I think you probably do want to think that it’s really just stuff, but once you start going through it I can imagine that it’s hard to keep that separation.
Brooke: Yeah, I mean, once they’re really gone their stuff is all you have. There’s stuff of my mom’s that I kept that I didn’t really like that much, but because it was hers I just couldn’t really get rid of it.
So when I go to an estate sale, having gone through that, I can see it through that lens of this is probably a bittersweet thing for the family. No matter what they’re having to leave this place and can’t take the bulk of their possessions with them.
It feels like you’re part of some bittersweet ritual, but it also feels like— I’m imagining these people like I would imagine my mother and grandmother, and they would want their stuff to go to people who will appreciate and enjoy it. And, also, it feels like you’re doing something for them in a weird way, too.
[CLIP ENDS]
Maggie: We really do spend a lot of time trying to define people, trying to know people, trying to fill the void of what we don’t know with an identity that makes sense. We do this even when we’re people watching, when we couldn’t possibly know what a stranger walking down the street is really like; we can only speculate.
But I would argue that we can only speculate about the lives of the people we know and love. We never know them fully; they remain strangers to us on some level.
So the process of going through a loved one’s belongings after they’ve passed is, maybe, an attempt at trying to get to know them better. As Brooke says, the stuff is really all you have left of a person once they’re gone. And maybe we comfort ourselves by thinking that a parent, a grandparent, a friend held onto something for so long because they want us to find it. They want us to find all the clues and solve the mystery of who they were.
My grandpa is the person closest to me who I’ve lost. We never really went through his belongings because my grandma survived him and continued to live in the house they shared down by the Jersey Shore. It wasn’t my dad and uncle’s childhood home, but my grandparents have been in that house for at least as long as I’ve been alive.
Which means… Geez, that means that at some point my grandparents decided to move all their possessions from one home to another. Everything kept, nothing thrown away.
After my grandpa died—it’s been about 12 years now—my grandma moved out of the bedroom she shared with him to the guest room (we’ve always called it ‘the flower room,’ because it’s decorated with a lot of flowers—from the wallpaper to the curtains. She hasn’t slept in that bed ever since and only goes into that room for her clothes and jewelry.
Looking back on it, we probably should have helped my grandma through the grieving process a little better. Going through my grandpa’s stuff might have helped. We could have gone down memory lane with her. We could have donated or sold things that were still in good condition. I guess we always assumed that my grandma would never be ready to let go.
Having an estate sale, going through a loved one’s belongings means that you’ve accepted, at least on some level, that you have to let someone go. You have to accept the forever-distance between you. On a more practical level, you know you need to do something with the stuff that doesn’t require a dumpster.
From the stuff our loved ones keep we might be able to uncover something meaningful when they’re gone. But the truth is that my grandpa held onto so much stuff because he’s hard-wired to do so. We all are. Research has shown that feeling like we’re connected to objects is part of human nature. Known as the endowment effect, we tend to place a high value on things we view as our own. Of course modern Western culture has impacted how we relate to things, but from childhood we tend to perceive objects as having a magical essence, and that carries into adulthood.
I want to take ownership of things that once belonged to my grandpa because, subconsciously, I think that they’re imbibed with his essence. That must be why my grandpa held onto every gift (no matter how lame—I’m talking race car nail clippers, here) I ever gave him: because when someone we love gives us a gift, the object seems to hold a piece of the spirit of that person.
Recently, my cousin found a faux leather checkbook with a Celtic design I apparently gave my grandpa for Christmas one year while she was going through his things. He kept a snippet of the wrapping paper with the gift tag inside of the checkbook:
TO: Grandpa
FROM: Maggie
I don’t know if this means that he never used the checkbook. Now I use it, and I’ve kept the gift tag inside it just as he did.
[CLIP BEGINS]
Brooke: Sometimes there are just some possessions that you just have to ask, ‘who was this person?
Like there was one a few years ago, I don’t remember where it was, but I just remember the basement seemed like it might have been an old office or something, and there was a lot of old newspaper memorabilia. Apparently this guy had been a member of the Georgia Press Association, and so there were all these type-written scripts from the Georgia Press Association’s big, political roast they would do every year that had all these musical numbers about the Atlanta politics of 1981.
And there was also a framed photo of 2 men from when the Atlanta Constitution and the Atlanta Journal combined. It’s a picture of the 2, I guess, publishers of the paper. It's a picture of them like holding up their papers, so you could just tell you this was someone who is deeply involved in Atlanta political journalism. It seemed like there was, I don't remember exactly what else was at the sale, but you could just tell this was an interesting guy.
Maggie: Have you ever been to an estate sale where someone seemed completely boring?
Brooke: Yeah, I mean, not every estate sale stands out as like, 'Oh, they must have been such an interesting person!' And I'll say, not even every estate gives you a sense, really, of who they were because if you come on the last day sometimes everything is so wiped out that there's just not much to go on.
But, yeah, I would say that more often than not you do get a sense of that person just because so much stuff is for sale. And the ones that I'm also really interested in are the crafters and the quilters and the women who have like just closets full of finished craft projects. My grandmother who is still alive actually went to an estate sale for the first time since COVID and this woman actually had some unfinished quilts, and my grandmother’s finishing them. And I know other people who are into that type of fiber arts, who when they find something that’s unfinished at an estate sale they kind of want to get it to the finish line for whoever the person is.
[CLIP ENDS]
Maggie: Whether it’s an estate sale or a regular ol’ stoop sale, you always get this sense that people have them because their stuff has unfinished business. I think that’s why people come back as ghosts in the movie Casper, right? Unfinished business?
Of course we’re talking about inanimate objects, but the point of a secondhand sale is to pass objects from one life to another, to save them from the fate of ending up in a landfill.
With an estate sale, you actually get to see a person’s belongings in the context of their home. I’m sure everything isn’t exactly as the person left it, but you like to think it is. A setting with the person removed from it.
I’ve been obsessed with what my possessions might say about me in my absence for as long as I can remember. I think it dates back to an episode of Boy Meets World where Sean breaks up with Angela because he’s obsessed with finding the girl who lost a purse he’s been holding onto, only to discover that Angela is the owner. Sean was convinced that the owner of the purse was the girl of his dreams, just based on the items he found within the bag.
I often find myself looking at my stuff and thinking about it as though I weren’t around. What would it say?
[CLIP BEGINS]
Brooke: I guess, subconsciously, that's why you decorate a place: to kind of convey yourself within it. I think subconsciously, probably. But I’ve also thought that if I die, and it's not suddenly and I have some runway, I definitely want to give certain things to certain people. But if I just kick the bucket, I tell my friends to take what they want, and then to take the rest to Goodwill. You know, pay it forward. I feel like that’s how I’ve gotten so many lovely things in my own life that…
Maggie: It sounds like your love of thrifting has been handed down to you by your mom and grandma, which is kind of cool.
Brooke: Yeah, cool in the sense that now I go to my grandma’s house and it’s just overflowing with the shit she’s bought over the years, and I’m like that is my future as a hoarder.
And my dad is a neat guy and doesn’t like a lot of junk, and I think he saw my mom’s tendencies as something she got from her mom and just had to deal with. My mom always referred to the stuff you find at an estate sale as treasures. I guess I’ve always had an appetite for treasures. And it’s kind of fun and interesting, it’s like spelunking in a weird way.
[CLIP ENDS]
[CONCLUSION]
Maggie: This year, my family decided that it was time to move my grandma into an assisted living facility. She’s in her mid 90s and her memory is going. She dips back and forth in time a lot—sometimes she’s a child again, sometimes she’s just started dating my grandpa.
We’re not entirely sure she even knows who any of us are. My dad and uncle she seems to always know, but she squints at the rest of us—my mom and aunt, my sister, my cousins, me—like she’s trying to remember where she knows us from.
We haven’t done anything with my grandparents’ house yet. For years we’ve understood that the arduous task of cleaning out a house that’s basically a museum to a couple who had been together for more than 50 years awaited us. We’ve slowly started the process.
Back in October, my uncle rented a dumpster and he and my cousins managed to clear out a lot of...let’s just say stuff that no one would want. (Apparently my grandparents’ shed was filled, floor to ceiling, with old Tupperware.)
I went one weekend to see if I could find anything that Brooke’s mom would call treasures. In my grandpa’s office, my aunt found an old, beat up Underwood typewriter that I’m hoping to get repaired (if I can ever lift it). My heart is set on inheriting my grandpa’s desk if I ever live somewhere bigger than a shoebox.
That weekend I was able to take home a really nice folding table that I can put up whenever guests come over for dinner, 2 small framed paintings that I’ve hung on my wall, and an old metal business card holder with my grandpa’s name on it:
L. J. Blaha
I like opening it up to see business cards with my name on them inside:
Maggie Blaha
Has 78+ tabs open in her browser right now.
I feel like I’m helping this thin, little case complete its unfinished business in some way. And with business cards that bear my name inside a card holder that bears my grandpa’s name, the forever-distance between us doesn’t feel that great.
[BACKGROUND MUSIC]
You can follow Thrift: What Your Garage Sale Says About You a few different places across the internet:
On Facebook & Instagram @thriftpodcast
Sign up for the newsletter at https://thriftpodcast.substack.com to receive show notes and extra content related to the podcast. You can also become a paid subscriber to receive even more bonus content, plus early access to new episodes.
Lastly, my online thrift store is live, and I’m slowly adding more items as I get them. You can find the Thrift Online Shop on Poshmark at the handle @thrift_podcast. You’ll also find updates about the store on Facebook at @thriftpodcastshop and on Instagram @thriftpodcaststore.
Thanks for listening!
[OUTRO]
[THEME MUSIC, 30 SECONDS]
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