Junk When I die, I will leave nothing but junk. If I went to my house, to my estate sale, after I died, I would buy everything. Of course, since I bought it all in the first place, that shouldn't be much of a surprise. Yet even if I wasn't me, I would buy it all. There are others that would do the same. People come to my house and are amazed by my junk, covet my junk. But those people are junkers. When people who aren't junkers come to my house, they laugh at my things.

Or they say my house is creepy because everything in it was owned by people who are now dead. I tell them, "They're not all dead. Some are in nursing homes." They just don't get it. If they walk into a house and don't see a plaid couch beneath a color-coordinated "Starving Artists" painting (the big, big sale in the parking lot of the Southfield Ramada Inn -- for all your art needs!), they become confused, disoriented, even hostile. I make a note of it: they will not be invited to my estate sale. The ad for it would probably go something like this, if I died today: Estate Sale Friday & Saturday, 10-5 15318 Vera Thirty years' accumulation. Lots of items! 1940s Chinese-red armchair, 1960s genuine cowboy davenport with ten-gallon hat sewn into cushions, 1950s department-store mannequin (male), 1930s dining-room set, 1970s lamp and artificial potted plant, 1940s red/white kitchen table, 1950s cherry-wood Olympic Deluxe console hi-fi.

Hundreds of LPs and eight-track tapes, large selection of lurid paperbacks, extensive black velvet art collection: crying clowns, matadors, naked ladies, thin Elvis and fat Elvis! Other collections include: kitchen clocks, ugly lamps, ashtrays, pitchers, cocktail shakers, bongos, souvenir buildings, souvenir spoons, salt & pepper shakers, and more! Full garage. Full basement. Spend the day! No early birds. Occasionally, I am forced to deal with plaid-couch types in my house. E.g., those now-frequent occasions when my sister Linda comes by, for some reason connected with my mother's health. Linda believes everything has to be new.

She drives a new car, lives in a new house in a new subdivision with her new husband. After a few minutes in my living room, Linda is in a dither. (Or would it be a snit? I'm never sure about those two.) Linda simply doesn't know what to do around objects from garage sales and Salvation Armies and thrift shops and secondhand stores. She looks at my stuff and I can tell she can't wait to get home and sit an her beige plaid couch next to her beige plaid armchair across from the beige plaid love seat (parlor-tanned hand on the beige plaid antimacassar), under the hotel painting done in tones of tan, bone, beige, sienna, and sepia. If Linda sits at my place at all, she perches on the edge of my cowboy couch, like a small white bird trapped in a smudgy, unclean cage. This is sad to me. Personally, I find new things boring.

They have no history, no resonance. I feel at home with junk. Secondhand. The word says it all -- other hands have touched that object. Think of all the things we touch every day, the million tiny linchpins that hold our lives together -- the coffee mugs, the tie clasps, the alarm clocks, the sunglasses, the key fobs, the beanbag ashtrays. What if they absorbed some scintilla of you, as if the oil from your fingers carried the essence of your soul? Then think of all the stuff you've ever owned, that's ever passed through your hands, where it all might be right now. Think of the million other lives you've touched through those things that you've owned, that carry the essence of you. Amazing, huh? Oh shit.

You're right. Most of it is probably in a landfill in New Jersey. But I do think that when you own something that once belonged to someone else, it's like some secret contact with them, with their past. A way to touch people without having things get all messy and emotional. That's what.