I dream of kijiji
Second-hand furniture, much like the parrot my friend Andrew impulsively bought for his wife for her birthday, will outlive us all by hundreds of years. Unlike parrots however, furniture is not inherently evil and has value to human beings. Whenever I buy second-hand furniture, I feel that I am buying the specific episode of micro-history that the piece of furniture bore witness to. And that piece of history, since most furniture cannot talk, has no choice but to radiate out of the fibers of the furniture in abstract shapes and light, much like a migraine aura. When I stare at the furniture, I can’t really clearly make out the stories, but I get a bit of an idea. Like I’m pretty sure that my dining room buffet, Captain Rick Shandy, came from a broken home and would probably be dying from lung cancer if he had lungs. Jan was a glass-front dresser storing pantyhose in a department store. She thrives on gossip more than organization, which is why they retired her. Chang Chang O’Toole, the fireplace surround, supported a lot of martinis and drunken elbows in his day. He got kind of sick listening to everyone’s opinionated, slurred views on politics, and most of the time he just tuned out and listened to the jazz music and the crackling fire that liked to tickle his belly from time to time just for attention. He’s possibly one of my favourite pieces of furniture, kijiji or otherwise. My chinoiserie entryway mirror, Rose, is most curious of all because she actually doesn’t even remember where she came from anymore. She just remembers waking up one day in an antique shop, coughing dust and surrounded by dubiously-obtained ritual masks from Africa and artifacts from the houses of people who mostly died alone in their houses. She suspects she is not even Asian though the shop owner kept trying to convince her she was. She’s one of those mirrors that spends most of her day telling people and other things that they are beautiful without even realizing how beautiful she is. For a mirror, she lacks introspection.
Here are a few of my favourite kijiji finds over the years in no particular order. Honourable mentions not in the gallery include Nutsy Malone, Sunjak, Octavia Broccoli, Bamboleo Tigre and Chops Archambault.
