Review of Everything for March: The Target Antiques

Here’s my review of everything for the march 2008 issue of bootleg.

Review of Everything-March 2008
The Target Antiques
by Josh Spilker

There’s this old cabinet that sits inside my mother’s house. Rescued from her grandmother’s house, it’s a wide cabinet with a countertop that she affectionately refers to as a Hoosier Cabinet. Popular in the Indiana watermelon fields, it had sat in my great grandmother’s house since the 1910s, with many such peaches preserved and peanuts shelled on its white metal countertop. I went to my great grandparents’ house a few times before they both died. They lived on a farm, off of a dirt road. A sprawling farmhouse, its backyard was full of watermelons, cantaloupes, corn and the occasional peanut crop. The outlying barn housed a hundred cats in my estimation, amidst run down tractors and old glass Coke bottles.

The house contained much of its outdoor ambiance. With no air conditioning, screened doors held out the mosquitoes but not the smell of cats or ripe fruit. Afternoons spent on porch swings drinking tea ended in dinners of peas and cornbread.

I know my mom had many more memories of that house that I did, and she wanted a piece of it for our suburban Florida home. We lived in a new house, built towards the end of a cul-de-sac where all of the yards featured skinny pole trees held up straight by strings and wooden stakes.

If my mother had to rescue old furniture to be featured in her suburban home, what pieces will I save from my parents’ home, if any? Or what pieces of modernity will be passed on from my contemporary home to whatever ancestors I may have? How about this futon I’m sitting on as I write this. My first furniture purchase directly after college, I decided to swing for the fences and paid a full $400 to receive a top-notch frame along with thicker cushion than the normal futon from Big Lots.

Since that time, it has stuck with me through four cities in five years, alternately serving as my primary bed and primary living room centerpiece. Or perhaps the coffee-stained metal swivel rack I bought from Target will stand the test of time. It’s mass-manufactured frame came in a rectangular box that I assembled at home with a few shoves and grunts to make sure the pieces remained tight against the weight of my toaster oven and coffee machine. The wooden square that sits perched atop this four foot portable rack is stained by small amoeba puddles of coffee residue that line the top, showing off my many morning indiscretions of spilled coffee*. Perhaps this very rack will come to symbolize my existence to my grand-relatives, showing that life did transition from the 20th to the 21st century. To say that my morning coffee habit has any bearing on my legacy is perhaps like saying that a wadded up ball of aluminum foil showed a distinct pattern in our eating habits.

Or perhaps those two things will show a great deal. That the coffee craze of the late 90s and early 00s had an effect on people’s home making abilities. That our use of aluminum foil enabled us to preserve food for longer periods of time, along with the greatest access of food known to mankind. Perhaps my coffee routine will seem quaint in a number of years from now, when beverages have made a full transition to fruit juices, and caffeine is only consumed by energy drinks and pills. Or perhaps coffee reaches such a critical mass, that municipalities establish their own breweries and it is pumped in via old water pipes, and m coffee maker is seen as a simpler time, a less hurried season.

In reality, things hold importance just because they are still there. 102 year old people become national celebrities, just because they still exist–not because they’ve necessarily done anything that the media might consider spectacular, but just they have a found a way to navigate the trials of life without succumbing to them in one way or another. So we put potsherds and spoons in museums, not because they are great works of an age, but because they are the only works left from an age. The mouths they fed, the person that thought of them are all dismissed for the sheer survival skills of a spoon or fork.

That brings me back to the kitchen rack I got from Target. I went there to find something to put my coffeemaker on. I wanted a rack with shelves, so I could stick my toaster oven underneath it. On the bottom shelf sits our crockpot. All of these things I think more consciously about than the rack that those items sit on. I put coffee in the coffeemaker, bagels in the toaster oven, a roast in the crockpot. I understand what those things do–the rack just organizes. It sorts my already existing things into a tidy vertical column.

Perhaps that is the enduring legacy of the age. Not what we organize, but that we organize at all. That Excel and Access are classes all their own. That my email is sorted, that my computer screen is clouded with little “folders” telling me where to put things. But office organization has always existed, and perhaps so have cabinets. But at least my great-grandparents Hoosier Cabinet had a countertop to it, a platform to make and create. But as I drive around our fair town, I see whole stores devoted to cabinets and organization. Stuff to organize more stuff. We’re not making anything, we’re storing and organizing everything. The symbol of our lifetime in the early 21st century that will outlast us all is not the things that we organized, but the things that we organized with. Here’s to the Target antiques.

*copyedit after publication