RIVER CITY JOURNAL: AUCTIONEER SINGS FINAL DIRGE OF TWO LIVES

Sixty-plus years of marriage. A lifetime of loving children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Some four decades of meals and laundry. Dozens of gardens that were planted, tended and harvested. It will all go on the block Saturday in a small, west-central Missouri town where your wife's parents lived and died.

It is time for the auction. It has become a part of the ritual for surviving family members. While the mourning is still fresh and the wounds of losing loved ones aren't completely scabbed over, much less healed, the auctioneer will stand on a box and coax bidders to raise the prices higher and higher for hundreds of items that only a family can cherish.

Whoever buys the dining room table will never know how many good times were shared, not to mention the endless platters of fried chicken and the heavy bowls of gravy to go with the heavier bowls of mashed potatoes. They will never know why just the mention of Clara Clapp could send the entire assembly of hungry diners into hysterics. It's a long story, now committed to that special pocket of memories that belong to family members and to them alone.

No one who buys the file cabinet that resided next to the kitchen table will ever comprehend the years of conscientious service your mother-in-law devoted to radio listeners in and around the tiny town. For nearly 25 years she broadcast every morning except Sunday from that table, telling her small world what clubs were meeting, who was born and who died. Her voice was a constant reassurance during a quarter-century of turmoil and change. And she was a beacon of credibility and trustworthiness in an era of deception and cynicism.

Who will understand how important it was for Granddad to have the first potatoes, the first tomatoes, the first green beans, the first sweet peas from the garden, even though they may place the high bid for a hoe or a rake? Will they understand that the dark stains on the handles are held there by more than half a century of sweat? Will they realize, as Granddad did, that growing a garden is a labor of love, patience and frequent defeat at the hands of bugs who invade like invisible armies?

The auction will transfer ownership of a lifetime collection of this and that, some useful, some fanciful, some broken, some mended, some collectible, some overdue for the trash bin. Displayed on temporary tables set on sawhorses in the American Legion hall, the items won't have any connection to the lives they served and enriched. Could it be that at least some of the things will become important momentoes of someone else's life, someone else's family history?

Of course, members of the family already have taken what was most important to them. Your wife took the kitchen table and chairs, the one where so many radio broadcasts originated. And a hope chest built by her grandfather for her mother and her sisters to use. And some of the angels from the vast collection that, year after year, won the blue ribbon for the best collection at the Fall Festival. And cooking utensils that were favorites whenever large family meals were prepared.

You took photographs of your sons, ones that had been specially taken and framed for grandparents but ones which you, for some reason, did not possess. And a pair of ancient hand-operated grass shears for trimming around flowerbeds and along sidewalks.

Your sons took a bed made by a great-grandfather and cast-iron skillets and Dutch ovens. Whenever they sleep or eat a good meal, part of their grandparents and the good company of dozens of family members, living and dead, will be there too.

Strangers will take the rest. The box of door knobs. The bittersweet sofa. The pedal-operated sewing machine. The knick-knacks. The car.

Just think. Dozens of people your in-laws never met will become owners of possessions that were so much a part of two lives. Now that's an extended family for you.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.