"Lost and Found" on Smith Street is my Happy Place. Adam Sandler has a golf course inhabited by dwarfs in chaps; I have an indoor second-hand market in Fitzroy. Horses for courses, I guess.
While I do like adorning myself, and wherever I live, with vintage in all it's bedazzled, gold trimmed, baker-lite glory, "Lost and Found" isn't my Happy Place because of what I can hand over money for and take home with me. I love it because the music is always "just so". I love that the boards of the warehouse shell it's contained in have a little bit of give that only age can bring. And I love that while you're making those measured, peaceful steps amongst the merchandise and creaking boards, people don't come up to you to ask "how you're doing". In fact, in the labyrinthine nooks and crannies created by racks of clothes and shelves of jewelery (and crocheted rugs and ceramic lamps and snakeskin handbags) you feel utterly and complete lost in your own world of curiosities.
Whatever my life is when I step back out out those doors on Smith Street, just isn't there for those few moments when all the objects "not of our time" transport me somewhere else. To a sheepskin rug that was under my Zia's coffee table that I used to lie on when I was only three or four and run my fingers through over and over. To tin cups in different metallic 70s shades, that my Grandma and I used to drink out of when the house she lived in was being renovated and all the china was still in boxes. To my Pop's flat I went to only rarely, where I'd eat Choc Royals and watch Sesame Street on a big, old wooden TV with a round screen and brass dials, with the picture coming out in strange, faded colours.
There's also the sheer thrill of the unexpected at "Lost and Found". You never know quite what you'll find. Never. Which is special, considering that so little in your day to day life has the potential to bring you that teeny-tiny joy of something off the map. Maybe you can assume there will be fur coats that smell like moth balls, a range of printed nylon scarves, gold clip on earrings, perhaps a retro telephone stand... but other than that? You're in a foreign land where anything is possible. Where a gentle chaos reigns as to which curios and memories of the not-so-distant past have found there way there. Like when I visited a few days ago, I found an orange tartan-pattern Thermos in the exact style I'd found in a Salvation Army Store about five years ago (but have long since lost). One of my good friends had only just last week been talking about my slightly compulsive ritual of sitting out the back of the store we worked in, eating my soup out of this old Thermos almost every single day. She also mentioned how jealous she was of it at the time. Yes, my dears, she was jealous of a $7 Thermos from the Salvation Army. Which, in her defense, I can understand. I loved that Thermos as intensely as anyone could love an item of kitchenware without having it develop into some kind of disorder. The thing was, and still is, that there really isn't anything in the modern Tupperware arsenal with as much panache as on old school Thermos in mint condition.
And, so, in the Tale of Two Thermoses, here I was in "Lost and Found" five years/ one week on and I'd found another one. Conjured up out of the ether and just waiting quietly for me. Like I'd pulled up outside the train station to collect it with all of its bags to take it home - as if that had been the plan all along. So going back today to take possession of the Thermos in order to gift it to my friend, I had another wander through. And you know what I found? The Swiss Alps. So I decided to take them home with me. For only $8, how could I refuse?
