Baubles & Bones

I. Loveliness

"Could we have just a little bit of loveliness?"

That's what I said to Ass't Man yesterday, when we were talking about how harsh the store can be, and how that can grind you down.

Coworkers are kind and generous in their ways, for sure, as I wrote about yesterday. But often people in the store––workers and shoppers––are operating in Survival Mode.

Grateful-J has a rotten tooth with a hole so big, "you could put a pencil eraser in". Not surprisingly, the pain has been making him snappish.
"Go get it pulled," I said.
"I don't have three hundred dollars," he said. "I can barely buy gas to get to work."

Scraping by does not lend itself to loveliness.
Or, the loveliness takes forms that are . . . available.
I love that my coworkers share food. But, honestly, I don't desire boiled hot dogs.

The other day, a young woman in the toy section with her young daughter told me she was pregnant with her second child. Her boyfriend was really good to her, she said. When she had their first baby:
"He got everything for me. McDonald's, Burger King, AND Taco Bell!"
This counts the most: that this woman and her children are loved. That's lovely in spirit.

And yet, they're in the stew of poverty, which is a rough mix.

It can include poverty of spirit,
which has unlovely expressions.
After this woman told me the nice thing her boyfriend did, she turned and told her daughter to stop messing with the toys, or . . . [a threat so ugly to I'm not even going to post it here. I wish I hadn't heard it myself.].

I couldn't think of anything I could say that wouldn't make it worse for the little girl. I gave her one of the dolls she was "messing with", for free.
_________________________

Here's a fun thing I've noticed:
kids don't necessarily create chaotic messes.
They like to line things up in a row, like this little girl (a different one) has done. A little bit of grungy loveliness.

(She was playing by herself. Parents often leave their small children alone in the toys, which is right near an exit door. I don't know.)

II. Baubles

I try to create barricades of whimsy, for myself and others who like that sort of thing.
I restocked the Toy Bridge yesterday. I'm so happy when I see baubles from it in someone's cart, I'll often comment.
"Oh, you got the tiny hippo!"
And they'll often respond with happiness too.
"I just couldn't leave him behind." [Actual dialogue.]

[Bauble, 'from from Old French baubel "child's toy, trinket," probably a reduplication of bel, from Latin bellus "pretty". Or perhaps it is related to babe, baby. The meaning "a trifle, thing of little or no value" is from 1630s.']

In one of her novels, Hilary Mantel calls the Catholic Church "a bauble shop" (–via an article in the Guardian: "Not in disdain of religiosity though: it may be that religion is rather good at telling us about human weakness, self-admiration and enslavement to appetite.").

A bauble shop! Yes, that's it: I'm always saying it's its toys that attract me to the Church.

Oh! I just remembered the phrase the rag and bone shop of the heart.
Geez, how could I have forgotten "that raving slut who keeps the till"? From "The Circus Animals' Desertion", you know, by W. B. Yeats.
THIS is the poem to accompany me in the thrift store.
Or, better, to inspire me to write my own.

Look. Here I even am (just yesterday!) in a mirror, with a circus bear in a chariot bravely beating out a tune:

(We are low on book donations--shelves are looking bare.)

LOL--I looked up the etymology of lovely and find it is. . .

". . . applied indiscriminately to all pleasing material objects, from a piece of plum-cake to a Gothic cathedral"
––George P. Marsh, The Origin and History of the English Language, 1862.

Lovely, from Old English luflic "affectionate, loving; loveable".

Luflic. How great is that?
_____

I got up at 4:30 this morning (went to bed at 8 p.m.--it'd been dark for three hours).
Now it's 7:10, and light gray outside, and cold--very fitting for Veterans Day. I've been reading more Mass Observation diaries from civilians on the Home Front in England during WWII, so very much feeling what an unlovely grind that was. And we're still at it, war.

Enough of the grim! I'm going to work on my recreation of a Frida portrait now, before going to work. (The store opens at 10:30, and no one's there till an hour before.)

Have a luflic day then, eh?