Perhaps Like a Village

Perhaps like a village; perhaps that’s a way to describe it, our first art fair, the startup of "Wood for Good", sharing profit from selling my woodworking with local non-profits who serve the poor.   There was the man, Allan, who had big plastic bins full of “$3 toys” cut and sanded from 2x4s that his neighbors fed to him through the winter, and local builders.  His car hauler truck “my biggest seller”, he said, was clever, three cars cut, beetle-shape, the middle one upside down, nesting in the others.  It made me smile, my sleeping inner kid waking up.  And there were trains, too, locomotive, coal car, boxcars, and caboose.  One was from a piece of walnut his son had given him.  He’d loved that piece of wood.  His big-ticket item was a kind of log cabin dollhouse, complete with furniture and a fence around the front yard.

Bob and Elniecey were setting up next to us, new too, down at the end.  She had the weaving of African-American womanhood we’d left behind in Detroit, a warm weariness, a smiling through trials, a certain silent strength.  Bob was kind, quiet, behind her in her jewelry booth, busybusybusy the whole day, full of women trying on rings and earrings, their male companions straddling the double yellow line, the safest place, the greatest distance between all of the booths.  We talked a lot, Bob and I, now and then through the day.  They were from Austin, Texas, where he taught algebra in high school.  The conversation was warm, trusting, so trusting that I almost asked him how he lost all of his fingers on both hands down to the first knuckle, especially when we shook hands once or twice toward the end, saying warm goodbyes.

In the village in the morning in the time before the visitors came, those who were set up strolled the fire-engine width clear space between the east-facing booths and those opposite, glancing into the neighboring booths, smiling, exchanging good-mornings.  A kind woman approached, old-fashioned curly gray hair, old-fashioned glasses, old-fashioned warm smile, looking at our wood, our Goodwill banner.  She described how most of what she made came from garments from Goodwill.  “Hey,” I said, “Show me!”  We strolled down the lane, six or seven booths down.  She had what looked like a whole darned shop, two tents joined together, racks around the perimeter full of doll clothes, dolls along the top shelf “where the kids won’t  take them down and be brokenhearted if their mom’s can’t buy them.”  “What’s your favorite thing here?” I asked her.  “The bride dresses,” she said.  “I bought a bridal dress for $20 and made 19 dresses out of it.”  She showed me three of four of them.  $13.50.  I thought of my bread boards, the least expensive of which was three times that much.  Her prices seemed so small; I wondered how she could make any money.  “How do you figure the time you put into this dress, how much you’ll make on it for the time you spend.  She smiled that kind smile, not a seamstress but a counselor, a priest, a grandmother.  “I don’t; I just enjoy it.”

On the way back, I stopped into Allan’s and looked again at his best-seller car hauler.  $16.00.  I asked him how he figured the time he put into that truck, how much he’d make on it for the time he’d spent.  Perhaps he’d heard the response of the kind woman down the way, but I doubt it.  He had the same counselor/priest/grandfather look on his face when he said, “Aw, I don’t think about that; I just build ‘em and enjoy the heck out of it.” 

During the day the traffic in our booth was slow enough that I could stroll from time to time, to watch and learn.  The doll clothing booth was wonderfully busy, all women and children.  Allan and his wife sat in the opening at the back of their booth and just kind of smiled, calling out descriptions of their toys when people showed interest.  Bob and Elniecey had a good day, she said, as we were starting to pack up.  Enough to pay some of their bills, she said.  We had had a good day too.  I’d stopped thinking about how much we’d make for the time we put in.  I enjoyed the conversations on the double yellow line, my strolls along the lane, watching the neighbor vendors and their customers.  I enjoyed the neighbors and friends who came by, providing most of our sales, including Jack and Carol Crusoe, who came all the way from Gaylord, and hour away, not to the booth, but to Sears, and just happened to notice the art fair and just happened to see our booth, as surprised as we were to be in the same place at the same time.  It was Jack who had told me about these pallets of oak 1x2 boards that were being sold dirt cheap, these boards that I’d turned into breadboards by cutting and gluing and clamping and cutting some more and sanding and sanding and sanding. 

By the end of the day, Cecil happened to have run exactly 40% of our sales on his Goodwill credit card machine, and Kathy and I happened to have taken in exactly 60% in cash and checks.  That was the plan on this first “Wood for Good” sale – 40% of what we sold would support the homeless neighbors I meet there every Tuesday evening.  As we realized that perfect math, I thought that up there in the heaven that I doubt, the God who I don’t doubt was saying to me that He was seeing to it that it would be a pretty good day for us.  It was a pretty good day.  I didn’t bother to figure out how much we made for the time we spent.  I just enjoyed it.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.