Lost and Found

As fond as I am of found poems, I'm just as fond of found art. So I was pleased to run across the foundmagazine.com website, which features found notes, postcards, photos and the like which people have come across in their life wanderings.

What it reminds me of was this little junk shop on the side of 39 North between Louisburg and Henderson that I occasionally stopped by. And by occasionally, I mean like twice. The owner seemed to despair that far fewer came by his little lightless shop than they used to, or at least fewer than he expected to. Outside, among discarded refrigerators, furniture, tires and other junk too large to put on a shelf was a penned off area with the cutest puppies ever to be born in the wild and cared for by a strange man of indeterminate age whose dream of escaping his life as a handyman by renting a shack in the middle of nowhere and selling old Mickey Mouse glasses and old scratched up records by bands you've never heard of was clearly a failure.

I almost got one of those puppies, but we still had Fifi, our aged cat at the time, and she would not have been pleased. I was devoted to that cat and so would not have upset her intentionally. Beth's been taking it pretty hard since she died. It's been several months and she can't even tell the veterinarian why we haven’t been by -- every time she tries to call or pen a note, she can't do it. Thank God for "Squeak," (the subject of another post).

Inside the shop were rows of curios, boxes of clotheslike items, and other junk. I actually left the place with a $15 pair of used binoculars. They were the good kind, but have a loose part that you can hear when you shake them. But a new pair of that quality would be at least three times the cost, if not more.

What I didn't walk out with, to my later regret, was a box of letters and postcards that had been picked up from who knows where. The most interesting item in the box was this letter from a man to his girl. I recall that the man was writing from prison, though not much else, except that he professed his undying love to the girl. At the end of the letter, on the back, he had drawn a picture, using only his pen. It was a cat of some sort -- perhaps a lion. And it was beautiful. I don't believe it was a sketch from a photo; it was like a cougar's face peering from a group of flowers. Seeing that freehand drawing made me really sad. Here was a letter that had been discarded for who knows what reason -- a letter whose author had the raw skill to draw something that touched me through time but was wasting his talent away from behind the bars of a prison cell.

I don't know the story behind the artist and his would be lover, but if I had to guess, I would think that it would have any number of sad endings.

I wish I'd bought that letter, and the box of other ramblings, but I didn't and the place has since closed up, leaving me wondering what happened to those cute puppies, their benefactor, a woman who may or may not have loved a criminal, and a man whose artistic potential most likely never got the recognition, or exposure it warranted.

That's the tale of my piece of found art -- just in case you were looking for a little bit of melancholy to add to your day.