Thrift store schooling – You know how it is, sometimes it takes you quite a while to get used to something to where you kind of enjoy it. Like eating olives. Some of us still don’t like them, others have learned to like them, and there are a few of us who can eat them by the canful.
I was like that with thrift stores.
For most of my life, I had other things to do, which were better than going to thrift stores. Thrift stores used to be called ‘second-hand stores,’ not exactly a set of words that gave you a bounce in your step to be part of. More like words that suggested that you’d be going to a second-hand store because you didn’t have the money to go to a regular store with new stuff.
Then one day, several years ago, we were coming back from somewhere west, and she (you know who she is, and I always do what she tells me) wanted to stop and drive through downtown Sicamous. Downtown Sicamous. Not the edge of town where the dairy sells the ice cream, a quite reasonable place to want to stop. No, downtown Sicamous. What can there be to see in downtown Sicamous?
So we pull in to Sicamous, drive around a bit and like I thought, outside of it being a nice little town, there wasn’t much to see. Then, it kind of snuck up on us, and especially on me, and before I knew it, we were parked in front of a thrift store. She was going in, and I had two choices. I could sit in the car, or I could go in where I never really wanted to be, inside a thrift store. I don’t know what happened to all of my principles that day, but I followed her into the store.
And in that store, I finished school.
Not that I learned any great thing that I could use every day, but I learned that our education isn’t all learned in elementary or high school, or even college. Some of it can be learned from the resources that are most commonly found in thrift stores.
Like books.
In that Sicamous thrift store, I bought a set of two books called ‘The Canadians at War 1939 – 1945.’ Of course, there have been a million books written about the Second World War, most of which are not about the Canadian contribution.
And almost none of which tell about the enormous involvement of the merchant marine, the non-soldiers who daily crossed the enemy warship-infested Atlantic Ocean to get the crucial food and supplies needed by the soldiers in order to carry on the war in Europe.
I had never been taught about that in school. The Social Studies curriculum was too busy teaching us about the Industrial Revolution, what happened on the Plains of Abraham and the War of 1812. But I learned about the merchant marine in WWII because I was coerced into stopping at a thrift store in downtown Sicamous.
But it wasn’t those books that I wanted to tell you about.
Thrift stores also sell pictures. Lots of pictures. Scenery pictures, wildlife pictures. Pictures that you might call modern art. They can please your eye, perhaps inspire you, and if that’s all they could do, I probably wouldn’t waste this space telling you about them.
But they can also teach you something that you didn’t learn in school.
It was Sunday afternoon, just this last Sunday, in a thrift store in Calgary. I ran across a picture of a boy, about six years old, standing with a cap on his head and his hands in his pockets, looking down at the ground.
About four feet away, sitting on the ground, looking thoughtfully, I thought, up at him, was a frog. It didn’t seem that there was any thought, on the kid’s part, that he would step on the frog or, on the frog’s part, that it might jump up on the kid’s shoulder. But what were they thinking?
We’ll never know, even if we lie awake a month of Sundays, we’ll never know. But it was clear they were both thinking about something.
But there was a third person in the picture. Just not on the canvas. The third person was me. Pictures, as you know, aren’t painted for the people or the mountains or the flowers that are in them; they are painted for those of us who’ll look at them.
And I looked at that picture with many different thoughts, but mostly curiosity and imagination as to what they were each thinking.
And then I walked away.
I didn’t buy it. It was probably only seven bucks.
And now I’m kicking myself.
Because in that thrift store, I learned another lesson that I didn’t learn in school, something that someone of my age should have learned a long time ago, and a lesson that has nothing to do with pictures: when an opportunity presents itself, you better grab it while you can.
Even if it’s in a thrift store.
Even in downtown Sicamous.
