The Auction House

It was a cool dark night. I walked into the seedy auction house and every sage eye in the place gave me the once over. I knew I looked out of place but something from my childhood calls me to places like this. The antique theater seating was reminiscent of the salebarn where I spent thousands of hours of my childhood watching the cow punchers push the animals through the auction ring. I settled in a seat in about the 6th row. The man next to me said hi which I recpirocated. I could feel my pulse pick up as I watched the auctioneer run through item after item, selling it before I could decide whether to bid or not. The old auction hounds stood at the front, eyeing everything over closely but I wasn't so brave. Suddenly, the handler was holding an old stenograph machine, they couldn't get a bid so they threw in a roadside emergency kit. They were asking $10 and nobody was biting. To my covetous eyes, what should appear but a shoeshine kit. He threw it in to the lot and every wise soul sat there impassively. I went back in time to my early childhood. My older brother Louis sat proudly with his shoeshine kit, polishing his shoes to an impossible shine. First he applied the polish, then he rubbed it into every crevice, then he let it sit, then he got out the brush, he brushed it seemingly forever, finally he set aside the brush and took out a softer brush, after that it was the super soft cloth being buffed across the toe of the shoe feverishly, finally to be lifted as if it were a magicians cloth to reveal a shoe that looked more beautiful than a new one. Perhaps not all of these images rushed through my mind, but the sight of that shoeshine kit evoked a general feeling of nostalgia as I stared at it. From seemingly nowhere, two antique prosthetic legs appeared and the whole crowd guffawed. If anything was going to kill the mood to bid, I think it was those creepy buff colored fake legs with scratches all over them. I stared incredulously, trying to imagine Jody's face if I walked in the door with such a spectacle. In a split second I decided they could always be discarded and I just could not resist the shoe shine kit. The auctioneer was about to give up. The price was dropping and finally it went to $2 and it seemed my arm flew up with a will of it's own. The auctioneer collapsed onto his desk and lift his head in a dramatic gesture and said with great feeling "THANK YOU FOR YOUR MERCY BID." Everyone in the room burst into laughter and the handler came toward me with those legs... then another handler came with the roadside emergency kit, then another handler arrived with the shoeshine kit and the stenograph machine. It was my first auction and I was already the laughingstock of the auction house. As I walked by, people would say "oh so you're the 'leg' lady!" "Ha ha ha, I can't believe you wound up with those legs!" " What in the world are you going to do with those things?" I gave a sheepish grin and made several trips to the car with my $2 loot, justifying it in my mind the whole time as a necessary means to a vague end.
Ahh well, I think I got the last laugh on all of those old auction hounds. I have a nice shoe shine kit and roadside emergency kit for my car.
The stenograph machine sold on Ebay for over $70. I gave a leg to a friend to use as a gag gift and sold the other for $10 on Ebay which I absent mindedly sent to the stenograph machine buyer and accidentally sent the stenograph machine to the very nice Dr. who wanted the leg but that's a whole nother story.