The Call of the Found

I have a get-away cottage in Canada that property managers look after when I'm not there. Every time I visit again after any significant absence, I find they've tossed out a lot of accessories I had lying around or stored in the garage - things I really did plan on putting to use someday. They assure me that the items they discarded were stuff they knew I'd never use. It was stuff that was just cluttering up the place.

Out with the water filter. "They have better systems now." Out with the old bicycle, the spare bathroom tile, the fireplace logs. "They've probably absorbed too much humidity to light any more." Out with that extra set of screwdriver heads, the big garden rake, the old sump pump, the umbrellas, the trailer rope. Definitely out with that old lawn chair. "Anyhow, it lost its cushion long ago."

But then they take me prowling through local thrift shops and re-sale stores. Our eyes light up as we find bargain after bargain, each one "too good to pass up." Quite often, we'll end up buying almost exact replicas of the items that had been tossed out the week before. Of course, these items just look like duplicates. They are actually very different because my property managers and I have hunted them down ourselves. They weren't givens; they are the result of our own clever search, our bargain-hunter's keen eye.

I feel the same urge to buy at auctions, especially small-town auctions that take place out on "Old Airport Road." When a length of rusty chain-link fence comes up for sale there, it strikes me as just the thing I'll imminently be needing. However I know if there were such a thing as a "Rusty Chain-Link Fence Store" or even just a regular "Chain-Link Fence Store" - I wouldn’t even remotely consider going in there. My patronage of such a store would make my purchase planned and predictable. But when the item is dangled out of the blue at me, I feel the longing of the lion after prey it will bring down itself, as opposed to the lion's aversion to an old kill that somebody else made. Well, that analogy might not be apt in my case because I'm not a hunter. But in other terms, when confronted with the rusty wire being auctioned off, I feel it was meant for me because I ventured into this out-of-the-way place and found it offered by rare happenstance. This finding confers on it all the glamor and intrigue of buried treasure.

This impulse to value the thing you find yourself over the thing that is given to you extends to all sorts of areas of life. People are notoriously loathe to date individuals their mothers find for them, or individuals who are fixtures of their everyday environments. People are only likely to find allure in those they themselves discover, preferably in unlikely, exotic places. Someone they run into coming out of an old, forbidden "Members Only" opium den in San Francisco would strike them as the ideal partner.

On my most recent trip to Canada, I discovered there's an even broader base to the impulse to favor the thing that serendipity rains on you and that you have the acumen to pounce upon. I discovered that other species besides humans feel the thrill of the found.

My property managers have two Norwegian Forest cats whom they sometimes let out to roam at night. The husband-and-wife team have searched in vain for a brand of food that their cats won't turn their noses up at when it's presented to them as their daily fare.

The area is rife with stray cats. People who stay at the nearby camping grounds often dump off their pets at the end of the season. I had gotten into the habit of putting a dish of cat food out on my porch for one such bedraggled stray I'd sometimes see limping across the fields. After a while though, I noticed that the stray was rarely getting any of the food. Instead I'd glimpse one or the other of my property managers' cats, come down the whole length of the road, to lap it up with relish. The food was the same brand they'd reject when it was served to them in their own homes.

I started to fill two dishes, hoping the stray would get there in time to consume at least one of them. But no. A few nights later, I watched as one of my managers' Norwegians greedily ate the contents of one plate, then proceeded to polish off the whole of the second plate. After it had sated itself, it briefly turned and stared at me through the windows of my French door. There was a triumphant gleam in its eye - the same sort of gleam that radiated from my managers and me as we discovered a lounge chair, tucked away in the back room of Second Hand Rose. "It's perfect! It only needs a cushion!"