Secrets of the Second Hand

By Micaela Philips

Imagine a store where shelves are littered with one thing, opportunity. A place where each and every item offers you the chance to experience something you never have before. An Opportunity Shop is essentially a world of second hand possibility, you walk through the door and it’s like stepping back in time, where history is embedded in the quirky items lined up in slightly haphazard rows; but once an item reaches an Op Shop, its past is somewhat erased, its story becomes a secret and all the new owner is left with are the battle scars; the scratches on an old camera’s plastic body, the worn soles and softened leather of once loved cowboy boots, someone’s name scribbled in the corner of a book. What sort of lives have these objects lived? Did they matter to someone? Do they not matter anymore?

Urban Dictionary defines an Op Shop as, “A store with a peculiar odour created by the used clothing and household items within. Fabulous for unique fashion finds, or curiosities for the kitchen that are not to be found in your general retail outlet.” (“Urban Dictionary: op shop”, 2016). Op Shopping or ‘Thrifting’ has become an international phenomenon, with many people making blogs to document their Op Shopping adventures. The idea of giving an object new life has become very popular, with bloggers compiling lists of the best local thrifts and even offering tips on how to best utilise your local Op Shop. Old and forgotten things are now finding new life.

The most commonly known Op Shops in Australia are St Vincent de Paul (Vinnies), Salvation Army (Salvos), Red Cross and Anglicare, to name a few and that’s not including the independently run stores. These are the stores that you stumble upon by accident and end up getting lost in. You lose track of time, walking around to every over stuffed rack, staring intensely at all the knick knacks. Personally, I have this overwhelming need to touch, to feel all the fabrics, run my hand along the covers of old worn books; as if touching it will give me some insight into its past; but that is one thing we’ll never know. We will never fully understand how loved these objects were before they came to be on the dusty, misaligned shelves of opportunity, or if they were used for anything more extraordinary than the life they are about to be re-given.

I myself have walked out of many an Op Shop with a few gems under my arm and more often than I care to admit, I have found myself wondering about the life these objects lived before I found them and so to ease my curiosity I made up stories for my thrifted wonders. Here are a few:

A young girl in the 90s who identified as goth and had an obsession with skulls and an undying love for Alfred Hitchcock, one of her favourite things is the bloody skull candle her mother bought her, she even cut off the wick so she would never light it and she could keep the candle forever. Then as she got older and she got over her love of skulls, she donated it and a pile of graphic skull t-shirts to her local Salvos. That skull candle now rests on my desk, purchased for $2 and forever un-lightable.

An old woman is cleaning out her garage, in some dusty old boxes she finds books she loved as a teen and held on to; Jane Eyre, Journey to The Center of the Earth and Night Watches. These books, her daughter never wanted.

So the only place left for them was the Op Shop, where I stumbled upon them. They are now on my bookshelf.

A hip young teen was in love with her new platform sneakers, she wore them with Summer dresses and her tight acid wash jeans. They set off her leg warmers perfectly. She loved to dance and those sneakers have seen many a late night and many a sticky dance floor. Pretty soon she started to grow out the sneakers, so her mother dropped them off at the Vinnies, where I found them, the only pair and just my size.

An old man, with an epic beard and tattoos running down his arms and across his chest, sitting in the pub with his other retired truck driver friends, enjoying one more VB before heading home to the missus. He forgets his Jim Beam denim jacket on the stool and never comes back for it. The bar manager adds it to the lost and found/donations bin, where later it would be donated to an Op Shop and bought by me for $10. This is now my favourite jacket.

Why do we chose to decorate our lives with the past of others? How amazing does it feel to find that perfectly imperfect little figurine for your desk or that coat that completely redefines your sense of style? Something that feels entirely yours and that you were meant to find it and yet someone before you felt the exact same way. This object was once a part of someone else’s life, part of their everyday being.

Someone else’s worn out memories suddenly become the perfect edition to your life. Op Shops allow you to take someone’s past and and make it your present, there is an opportunity to redefine your style and sense of self with the pre-loved and the forgotten. is it the object itself that attracts us or the idea of some secret past life that we imagine might fit who we are now? If (and when) we move on, will these objects attract someone new, someone who will have the same thoughts and think about the possible number of past owners an object may have had, what they might’ve been like.

We can only imagine what lives these forgotten objects lived and what they’ve been exposed to before we bring them into our homes. We only know that they were loved enough to not be thrown away but instead to be given the opportunity to change our lives as we can only dream they changed someone else’s.

We can only ask ourselves: Do the secrets of the second hand matter? Should they?

[14] Urban Dictionary: op shop. (2016). Urbandictionary.com. Retrieved 28 August 2016, from http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=op%20shop