Starting my sophomore year of college, a group of us would regularly gather to read poetry. The tradition, fondly (and somewhat uninspiredly) known as “Poetry Friday,” was less elitist and irritating than it sounds: not so much a bunch of intellectuals sitting around a table as a bunch of undergrads sitting on the floor. Poetry Friday always ended with raucous Irish drinking songs in a big circle, a long and slightly uncomfortable Platonic embrace.
Poetry Friday introduced me to poetry as a practice rather than a study: though it had intrigued me in the past, poetry was something that you memorized for school or read privately in your room, not something that you sat around in a circle listening to, struggled with pronunciations in real time, left at the end of the evening mystified and elevated.
I first fell in love with my college in the fall, as the golden leaves were falling on a tiny Midwestern town abandoned by the automotive industry. But by my sophomore year, some of the beauty that I fell in love with had started to fade, edged out by a Pelagian obsession with accomplishment that left its cold fingerprints on my heart and life. Poetry Friday breathed poetry again into a life that had begun to succumb to unpoetic circumstances internal and external, insisting that not everything was about what I did, that it was important to occasionally sit back and perceive.
When you frequent the estate sale circuit in South Bend, Indiana, a variety of patterns emerge. For one, estate sales often demand cash, despite the fact that pieces of furniture can cost several hundred dollars. This can mean that you and your twenty-something friends may need to pool your paper bills and venmo each other if you happen to find a Greek icon no one knows the value of, or a couch that magically meets the requirements of both your roommate and yourself. Estate sale proprietors tend to run all the sales in a given area, and you’re likely to see the same people selling things at different places.
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