Flea Market Finds

Flea Market Find

Frank Sinatra sang about it in “Strangers in the Night.” Popular songs and literature covered the theme through the decades—the chance of meeting a stranger who changes your life. Hopefully, it’s for the good, but sometimes, things go wrong. Sometimes you know it’s the right thing, but most of the time not.

In my life of just over sixty years, I’ve met many people, and mostly they were good interactions. For instance, when you suffer from a life-threatening illness, meeting a doctor is one thing, but meeting the who can save your life is another. I was lucky to have found that doctor and others who have kept me alive over the decades.

It would seem that finding someone who saved my life would be the turning point, but it was not. The turning point in my life was the day I met my wife.

I was young, barely out of high school, and traveling with my family. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but I always felt the need to be creative in some fashion or another. Back then, I didn’t have a career path. I wasn’t sure what a career path was as there didn’t seem to be a good definition available. Meeting Nancy eventually set me onto a career I didn’t know existed.

My parents and I went to a local flea market on a September day in New York state where we lived. Making rounds of the booths in the market, I spotted her. She sat on a fold-up lawn chair in front of a blanket piled with stuffed animals for sale. As was my habit of talking to anyone who sat still long enough, I struck up a conversation with her.

Over the next couple of hours, we sat and talked. I found out she’d made the stuffed animals she was selling. She lived with her mother as her father had passed several years before. After introducing her to my folks, we had quite an enjoyable conversation. It went so well that I took her out that evening.

The date wasn’t glamorous or sexy. We went someplace inexpensive to eat and drove around the state park, which was nearby. Back then, neither of us had any money. She drove a banged-up, old pickup truck that had seen better days, and money from selling at the flea market helped support her and her mother.

From then on, I helped her at the flea market every weekend and spent all my time with her. But life changed for me when my family and I left New York and moved to Texas. By then, Nancy and I were in love.

For the time I was in Texas, we wrote continually, and eventually, I found my back to New York. I lived in a small apartment in a nearby town and went to college. As many weekends as possible, I took the bus to the town near her, and she’d meet me there. I’d spend the weekend with her and her mother at the old farmhouse they owned in the middle of nowhere. There was never any extra money for anything, but we did okay.

When my parents needed help back in Texas, I went back for a year, but I couldn’t stay away and returned to New York and her. This time I remained, and in December of that year, we married. Now over thirty-five years later, we’re still married, raised four kids, have grandchildren, and built a thriving business.

Looking back over the decades, I remember bits and pieces of our lives, some more clearly than others. Most of the early years have faded into a tapestry of memories that come and go as fast as time went back then. But occasionally, I can close my eyes and see her sitting in that old chair with stuffed animals around her.

I try not to think about what would have happened had I not decided to talk to the girl with the stuffed animals. I think about my life now and how lucky I am that we didn’t pass in the night but chose to make a life together. The life that we enjoy now.

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