Three Chairs

Second-Hand, Not Second-Rate

"Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts."

~Henry David Thoreau

When I was 14 years old my 86-year-old great-grandfather died.  He died in his sleep, as peacefully as he had lived.  He was from Sicily, he was a barber, he wore wool suits and hats in the summer, and he had a habit of falling asleep while sitting up, his head propped up against his hand.  He was a true gentleman.  He left each of his three children $3,000, and my grandmother gave $1,000 of it to each of her two daughters.

My mother was not one to squander money on clothes, jewelry, or unnecessary knickknacks.  Both of my parents were frugal.  We turned off lights when we left a room, drove a gas-efficient car, and shopped at K-Mart and resale clothing stores.  My mother had become an expert at finding resale bargains for me and my two brothers, but was turned off by most of the stores she shopped at.  Racks were overflowing and unorganized, the good stuff was mixed in with the double-knit polyester, and there was little, if any, quality control.  She decided she could do it better, so she used my great-grandfather's $1,000 to open her own store.

Her formula for current, immaculate, name-brand clothes in a clean, well-organized environment was successful, and within five years she had several stores.  She learned by trial-and-error and developed a loyal following of customers, many of whom became good friends over the 16 years she was in business.  She also developed a loyal following of complete quacks and loons who were an endless source of amusement and aggravation to us.  I worked for her on and off through college and in the years before I left for graduate school, and the experience taught me more about people than I've learned anywhere since.

There was Vi, a 70-something year-old woman who came in weekly to look for cowboy boots, rhinestone jewelry, tank tops and mini skirts.  Vi had chronic back pain from a lifetime of wearing high heels, but she refused to wear anything else.  Vi's overly made-up face looked like it was stuck in one of those NASA 20-G centrifuge machines, the skin on her cheekbones taut, her mouth always partially open, her nostrils approaching her earlobes.  We were pretty sure that Vi was either the proud owner of the very first breast implants, or was shoving socks in her bras.  She was petite and feisty, not unlike a wet chihuahua.  Vi was fighting for her lost youth, and she was losing the battle rather ungraciously.

There was Miriam, a mousy, thin woman with deep lines etched in her face and a hangdog look in her eyes.  The first time she came in she started grabbing armloads of clothes and piling them up on the counter.  "Do you want me to start a dressing room?" my mother asked.  "Oh no, dear, I'm going to buy all of this."  My mother stood there disbelieving, ruing the moment she'd have to put it all back.  Miriam didn't try a stitch of it on, but she did put it on lay-away - hundreds of dollars of resale dresses, sweaters, blouses, and skirts.  It would take her months to pay it off, but she did.  Not, however, before starting another lay-away.  She often had three of them going at any given time, and every few weeks she'd come in and put down some random amount of money: $42, $18, $34.  She told us she had converted a room in her house into a closet, but we never saw her wear any of the hundreds of things she bought.  I suspect that Miriam was trying desperately to fill an empty place in her life, and I've always felt sad for her.

I have fond memories of some of these women.  Wilma became a friend of the family over the years.  After her husband died Wilma started drinking.  Wilma started showing up at the shop drunk, and my mother worried about her.  She seemed unbearably lonely, so my mother invited her to our home for Thanksgiving one year.  Wilma brought a homemade cranberry dish that my brothers and I steered clear of, suspicious of cranberries not from a can. We started calling cranberry sauce "the Wilma."  It wasn't meant in a mean way, and to this day we make "the Wilma" for Thanksgiving.

At times my mother's shop seemed like a beacon in the desert for crotchety hagglers and wealthy bargain-hunters.  The worst were the women who could afford to shop anywhere, but would come to my mother's resale shop, browse through the clothing with suspicious expressions on their faces and one bejeweled pinky poised in the air.  After an hour of browsing they would carry one item to the counter.

"Ready?" my mom would ask.

"Mmmm, no.  I was wondering if you could do better on this?"

"Mamn, this is a 100% silk Liz Claiborne blouse with the original store tags on it.  It's $6.99.  I can't do any better."

"Mmmm.  I see.  Well then, no thanks."

There were those who would wave an item in our faces like a flag and say, accusingly, "Why on earth is this $89?!"

"It's a 3-piece Calvin Klein suit.  It retails for over $400.  It's a steal."

"But it's used!"

"Would you rather buy it new?  I believe Dillard's is still carrying it."

"Can you do better?"

"No."

I wonder if those women were looking to balance the excesses in their lives by finding the ultimate deal, if it made their day to find a dime on the sidewalk?

One day an elderly lady came in and picked out four dresses.  She didn't want to try them, she explained, because they were for her daughter.  My mother asked if she wanted us to hold them so that the daughter could come in and try them on.  We had a No Exchanges or Refunds policy, she explained.  Many of our items were on consignment, and at the end of each day the sold items were recorded on the consignor's index card in a filing box we kept on the counter.  It was OK, the woman assured us, her daughter would love them.

Sure enough, the adult daughter came in the next day and wanted to return the dresses.  My mother explained that she could not take them back, and said that she had made that clear when they were purchased.  The daughter complained, "But I don't like these, I'm never going to wear them!" 

"I'm very sorry.  We offered to put them on hold so that you could come in and try them on, but your mother didn't want to."

"But I don't want them."

"I'm really sorry. Maybe you have a friend who would like them?"

"This is ridiculous!  You have to take these back!"

Perhaps it would have been more prudent to take them back, but I don't blame my mom.  Day in and day out she dealt with people who wanted something for nothing, who criticized her pricing, who shoplifted and left garbage in the dressing rooms.  She ran a second-hand store and was often treated like a second-rate person.  She had policies and she had made them clear.  She had practically begged the woman not to buy the dresses for her daughter until she had seen them.

My mother stood her ground.  "I'm sorry, I can't take them back."

The woman glared at my mother, furious, then turned on her heel and stormed to the door.  My mother went back to some paperwork on the counter.  As the woman opened the door she yelled, "Here, just keep the shit!" and hurled the bag in the air.  It sailed across the shop in a perfect arc, its trajectory clear and true, and landed exactly on top of my mother's head, knocking off her glasses.

My mother looked up, shocked; the woman slammed the door; I burst out laughing.  The other customers began to gather around and comfort my mother, but I was of no help whatsoever.  I could barely breathe I was laughing so hard.  It was so ludicrous, so insane.  There was just something about that plastic grocery bag stuffed with clothes, flying 15 feet across the store and hitting my mother on the head.

It took my mother a while, but eventually she was able to laugh about it, too.  My mother doesn't have the stores anymore.  She closed the last one about 11 years ago, deciding she'd had enough of the busloads of cranky senior citizens, the snobs, the hagglers, and the bag-throwers.  She moved from Tucson to the hills of Southwest Oregon nine years ago, and now she spends her time gardening and cooking.  Every once in a while she goes resale shopping and sends me something she thinks I might like.  I am proud to say I have never thrown any of it at her head.

Of Bicycles and Armchairs

While armchair travelers dream of going places, traveling armchairs dream of staying put.

~ Anne Tyler

I'm getting better on my bike.  For the past few weeks I've been dropping the kids off at school and then hopping on my bike and heading north on the Green Bay Trail.

That's my bike you see on the left.  It's an old Raleigh 3-speed, made in England, and I bought it at a bike shop for $100 about 15 years ago.  It's heavy, really, really heavy.  I think it's made of concrete-infused lead.  All those fancy bikes made of Titanium and High-Carbon Steel?  Yeah, not this one.  Lead.

It used to have a charming wicker basket with leather straps on it, but over the course of several decades it rotted and disintegrated.  I'd like to think that the basket used to be filled with egg sandwiches, lemonade and chocolate cake, and that the bike was pedaled by a cheery, young English girl going to meet her American soldier and lover in the hills of Cornwall (for the sake of accuracy I should let you know that I haven't bothered to verify the bike's manufacture date or the likelihood of American soldiers in Cornwall).  Now I have a spiffy new metal mesh basket that slips on and off should I want to carry it somewhere.  I have yet to carry it anywhere; I load it up with a bottle of water, my purse, my camera, a sweatshirt, and a book.  If I put too much stuff in the basket it pulls the bike precariously to the right or left, so I have to be careful.  I am, afterall, a riding "disastro."

On the trail I am frequently passed by Really Serious Cyclists who shout out, "ON YOUR LEFT!" as they whiz by.  They always scare the crap out of me and cause me to go flying into the shrubbery, and I'm tempted to yell after them, "No need to yell, Lycra-ass!"  I'm amused by the paraphernalia and gear that the Really Serious Cyclists have.  Helmets shaped like Pteranodon heads, two ounces of Lycra stretched taut over their lithe bodies, little mirrors that look like dental instruments attached to their temples.  My only accessory is a scratched up pair of over-sized fashion sunglasses from Target ($12.99!).  The only thing I have in common with these Armstrong-lookalikes is that I shave my legs, too.

Make no mistake, I know what these Really Serious Cyclists think of me.  I have no helmet, a bike that weighs 200 pounds, a basket loaded with all manner of unnecessary weight, and an inability to steer in a straight line.  Hell, sometimes I even ride my bike in a skirt.  I'm not intimidated, though.  I suspect they're jealous because they suffer from genital numbing and I don't.

There are a lot of walkers and joggers on the trail, and we all smile and nod or say, "Good morning!" as we pass each other.  Every once in a while I catch a snippet of conversation that makes me chuckle ("She's 42 years old and throwing herself at him like a school girl!"), but every once in a while I see something completely inexplicable, something that makes me stop my bike and stare.  Something like a reclining armchair.

Let's be clear: the Green Bay Trail runs through some of Chicago's toniest North Shore suburbs.  Why, you have to ask yourself, is there a filthy armchair perched in the grass just as you enter Glencoe?  Why is it slightly reclined, and who has been reclining in it?  Surely it doesn't belong to the 6,000 square foot château on the other side of the trail?

The next day the chair was turned over on its side, no doubt the victim of either teenagers or a large pack of renegade chipmunks, I'm not sure which.  It remained like that for about a week, and then one day, it was gone.  I miss the armchair, its quirky presence in the pristine refinement of Glencoe, its sedentary declaration against all the activity around it.  I miss the way it made me smile no matter how many times I saw it.  I'm going to wonder about that chair for a long time.  Maybe it is now, as I type, in the living room of a rather sore Really Serious Cyclist?

Some Kind of Nerve

"A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up."

Atticus Finch

Perhaps it was flippant of me to post status updates about Jury Duty on Facebook; certainly I wasn't thinking about the bigger picture when I was uploading a photo of my juror's lunch.  At that point in the experience I was thinking about the inconvenience of it all.  Let there be no doubt, Jury Duty is inconvenient, unless perhaps you have nowhere else to be and nothing else to do, and even then I think most people would rather watch back-to-back Jerry Springer episodes than hear two teams of attorneys endlessly nitpick each other.

But let's start at the beginning.  When I received the summons for Jury Duty I was sure I could stamp "SAHM" on it, send it back, and brush my hands of the matter.  Civic Duty be damned, I have kids to raise, laundry to do, peanut butter sandwiches to make!  I didn't send it back, though; I tossed it in a pile on my desk and forgot about it until we got back from vacation two weeks later.  The night before I was scheduled to appear I was supposed to call an automated system to see if my presence truly was required.  Here, too, things might have turned out differently had I been able to find the summons, but it had vanished.  I'll probably find it next year wedged between the instructions for the new fish tank and a very overdue library book.

It took me two hours driving in the pouring rain to get to the Criminal Courthouse at California and 26th, but only five minutes to get a new summons and my panel number.  I settled in for the long wait, book and iPhone in hand, but my panel was the first to be called, and 50 of us were assembled in the courtroom by 10:00 a.m.

If you've ever considered regression therapy you might want to consider Jury Duty instead.  The selection process will leave nothing of your past uncovered.  How old are you?  Where do you live?  What do you do?  What is your highest level of education?  Then, when these innocuous questions have left you fairly relaxed: Do you know any lawyers, judges or police officers?  What are their names?  Have you ever been the victim of a crime?  What about your friends and members of your family?  Have you ever witnessed a crime?  Have you ever been arrested?  Do you have any pending court cases?  Have you ever watched Law & Order?  OK, I'm kidding on that last one.

I sat through 24 jury interviews, my own included.  My fellow jury candidates ranged in age from 18 to 62; two of us had Masters degrees, many had not gone to college.  Some of them had had their cars burgled, their homes broken into, their family members dragged to court, and their relatives sexually offended.  One of them had a brother who was convicted of murder.  Another had a coworker who had been accused of killing someone; he hadn't kept in touch to see if the man was guilty or not.  One woman had lost a nephew to a stray gang bullet.

By 2:00 p.m. a jury of 12 and two alternates had been assembled.  We heard opening statements about the case.  The defendant, Deandre Smith, was accused of residential burglary.  The prosecution told us that by the end of the trial we would have no choice but to decide that Deandre was guilty.  The defense lawyers told us that despite Deandre's confession at the time of his arrest, he was innocent.  I was curious to see how that might play out; I myself had never figured out how to admit to doing something while successfully proving that I had not done it.

The next day we heard from six witnesses, all of whom were called by the prosecution to testify about the burglary.  We heard from the tenants of the burgled apartment, police officers, and a latent print expert.  There were no eyewitnesses, but there were fingerprints, and when those fingerprints led to an arrest, the suspect made a confession, and that confession was put into a police report.  Despite that confession we were in court because Deandre Smith said he was innocent.  He never actually said it to us; he never took the stand.

Toward the end of the first day it was increasingly hard to pay attention.  I wanted to flip my notebook to a clean page and write a message to Deandre in giant, bold letters.  "DID YOU DO IT?"  I kept my brilliant idea to myself and kept taking notes.

The next morning I parked my car in the "Police, Employees, Jurors" garage and listened to the Coldplay while finishing my Dunkin Donuts Bavarian Creme Donut (turns out the court-provided donuts are better).  If the lyrics were any indication, things weren't looking good for Deandre:

"I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning I sleep alone
Sweep the streets I used to own"

Jurors are not supposed to discuss the case with each other until after closing arguments have been made and the deliberation process starts, but I am pretty sure that in the history of juries this has happened exactly zero times.  As we sat in the jury room that morning waiting to be called to the box we talked about what we'd heard so far.  It was easy to tell who thought he was guilty, but much harder to tell who thought he was innocent.  Some of us were outspoken, other remained completely quiet.

On the third day we heard from two more witnesses and were then free to deliberate over our lunch of corn, mashed potatoes, and chicken patty sandwiches.  Before we filed out of the court room I took one last look at Deandre.  He sat silently in his baggy jeans and crisp, striped, polo shirt.  His hair was short and his shoes were bright white.  He hadn't moved much at all the last three days, hadn't made eye contact, hadn't seemed to be paying much attention.  Occasionally one of his lawyers would whisper something to him, and he'd lean his tall, slouched figure in that direction, listen and nod.  I took a last look at Deandre and filed into the jury room.

It took us a little over two hours to convict Deandre Smith of residential burglary.  When we started deliberating eight of us thought he was guilty.  We debated whether Deandre had entered those premises without authority and with the intent to steal.  We kept getting hung up on "entered."  Deandre's fingerprints were found on the outside of the window, but not inside.  Had he entered?  He said he had.  He said he reached into the window and took a bag of coins.  But one very soft-spoken, African-American teacher, and three other jurors weren't buying it.  Our teacher was sure he was taking the fall for someone else that had been there, that we had no proof that he had entered that apartment.  She wanted fingerprints on the inside.  She said that the police could have lied about his confession.

This went on for a long time, and then Charles Barkley came to the rescue.  Actually, I doubt that Charles Barkley was in the jury room with us, but his jury-double was there.  Tall, broad, bald, and imposing, Charles' double stood up and towered over us.  "Look," he said, "You know I don't want to send a brother to jail.  You know I don't.  And he probably is covering for someone, because you know that in our culture we Do Not Rat People Out.  But that's Deandre's choice.  If he wants to take the hit for someone, we're going to let him do it, because he's the only one on trial here.  He did it."

We took another count.  Eleven.  Our teacher-juror resisted.

We all sat back and watched Charles Barkley work on her.  He spoke eloquently and convincingly of the likelihood that Deandre would've climbed the stairs and crossed the precarious catwalk of a three story building, put his hands on two sets of windows, and then walk away without taking something, about the likelihood that when arrested for a crime he didn't commit, he'd say that he took a bag of coins.  "Twelve," he said, raising his hand in the air, "Show me twelve."  We all raised our hands.  We had a verdict.  Twelve people who had never met before had sat down together and decided to convict Deandre Smith of a felony, forever altering his life.  You could say that Deandre had already altered his own life, but I doubt there was anyone sitting in the jury box that day who did not feel an uncomfortable sense of power and unwanted responsibility for Deandre.

The clerk read the verdict and I watched Deandre. We all watched Deandre.  He didn't blink, he didn't look at us, he didn't move.  You would have thought that he didn't care.  I wanted to hold up my notepad with a new note, one that said, "ARE WE RIGHT?"

We filed back into the jury room and a few minutes later the Judge joined us.  She thanked us for our service and gave us certificates that read "Certificate of Jury Service" across the top. She joked that she was sure we would all go home and frame them right away.  She told us that there were things about Deandre that she and his lawyers had decided not to tell us before the trial because she didn't want us to be biased.  It turns out we had just convicted Deandre of his sixth felony. Deandre is 21 years old.

A deputy escorted us out of the courtroom and stopped traffic so we could cross the street.  Gradually the group splintered apart, calling out our goodbyes and "take cares."  I asked Jane, another Juror, if she wanted a ride home.  She said it seemed odd to just walk away like that, that we should be going out for coffee now, debriefing over what had just happened, what we had just done.  I dropped her off and we hugged goodbye.  We did not exchange numbers.

I listened to The Fray and thought about Deandre on the way home:

Early morning, City breaks
I’ve been calling for years and years and years and years
And you never left me no messages
You never send me no letters
You got some kind of nerve, taking all I want