Auction brings new experience
Contributing writer
I am still riding a wave of euphoria generated by my auction on Saturday. The outcome will be a welcome boost to the exchequer, but that is far from the only reason I am happy. It also added much to my store of experience and taught me a few things. At my age it is nice to know I'm still growing and learning.
Making new friends is always a pleasure. Chad and Angie Schmidt and Ora Hett became good friends, as well as doing a stellar job for me. Their moral support, when I doubted the sale preparations would ever come together, was almost as important as their business expertise. The Schmidt children were a special delight, boosting my spirits with their sheer joy of living.
When I was a child, an older neighbor wrote in my autograph album, "Make new friends, but keep the old. These are silver; those are gold." The support of old friends made the whole project possible. Anyone who did not see the shed where my husband had stored all his auction finds cannot imagine the mammoth job of sorting it out.
Some of my friends, particularly the Oborny family, put in as many or more hours at the task as I did. Ethan has to be the hardest working eight-year-old in the world. Jonas and Kim Frantz were also my willing slaves for the duration. Many of the jobs they performed would have been impossible for me. It would be impossible to name all the others who came to help from time to time. It is always good to be reminded of the special blessing God has given me in good friends.
Like all of life's events, the auction could bring out the best and the worst of human nature, but the best was far more evident. Organization took long enough that it was necessary to leave many of the objects for sale outdoors unattended. When a friend came to me the day of the sale to ask where the chick feeders and waterers were, we discovered they had disappeared. Since he had wanted particularly to bid on them, I was disappointed for his sake, as well as my own. However, they seemed to be the only items missing, so I feel fortunate.
Another instance of someone showing up in a negative light was the lady who finagled to buy an antique pincushion doll. She slyly moved it from the trailer with the other antiques to a different trailer. Later, I learned that Kim Frantz was waiting to bid on it and found it had already sold. I felt especially sorry about that, because it was Kim who had worked to make it presentable.
When we found it, the object was so filthy and tattered, I was tempted to throw it away, but she took it home and cleaned it up. Again, this was the only example I knew of people acting dishonestly to get an advantage. On the whole, my conviction that most people are honest and fair-minded was reinforced.
One more conclusion I came to is that people will spend more for something they want than for something they need. Most of the practical items on the kitchen trailer were sold cheaply, while antiques useless for their original purposes brought me a pretty penny, as my mother would say. An Aladdin lamp sold for nearly as much as my old Pontiac.
Sometimes I was happy for the pleasure I thought someone's purchase would bring them, as well as the pleasure their money will give me. From the time we found a half dozen old-fashioned children's sleds (the wooden kind with steel runners) I hoped they would be bought for children to play with rather than to set on someone's porch for a decoration. Saturday I talked to a woman who bought two of them for her grandchildren. I don't know what happened to the others, but I'm still hoping.
One of my husband's nieces wanted a box of old valentines and Christmas cards as a piece of her heritage. I was glad she placed the winning bid, although she may have paid too much for them. A part of me felt I should give them to her, but the realization that there were 14 other nieces and nephews forestalled the impulse.
In short, the experience of holding an auction has been interesting and rewarding — a tremendous amount of work, but also a lot of fun (thanks to my friends). I'll hold it in my memory bank forever. Just don't ask me to do it again any time soon.
