There are actually two parts to De Pere: the west side and the east side, and you cross the Fox River to get from one to the other. Yes, a river does run through it – broad and deep enough for yachts and speedboats to negotiate with aplomb, its banks pitted with willow-shaded corners and rocky outcrops for ducks and herons to perch on. More startling than its beauty to me, the visiting Manileño, is the Fox’s cleanliness: not one speck of floating plastic mars its surface, not one dark rivulet of sewage.
But it’s that kind of town, unhurried and unsullied, where the flags flew at half mast the day I arrived to honor the first fireman on its force to have died in the line of duty in 150 years. At lunch, the students in my college leave their backpacks in a pile on the cafeteria floor, and I’m sure that if I pulled on people’s doors I’d find more than half of them unlocked. On a walk across the campus with Beng, I paused and told her: "Something’s missing, we’re not seeing something. Guess what we always see at home but haven’t found here?" She couldn’t tell me. "Security guards," I said. "We haven’t seen a single security guard." And indeed we hadn’t, not even in banks, or groceries, or the college itself. Not one blue uniform, not one bag search. There is a De Pere Police Department; I know because I’ve seen a cop taking a coffee and doughnut break.
Of course, prettiness and placidity can be deceptive, and there’s no better place than Wisconsin to appreciate irony. This is a state often touted as the most politically progressive in the whole Union – as late as the ’60s, Milwaukee had a socialist mayor, the inheritor of a contrarian tradition brought over by the refugees from a troubled Europe who streamed into the American Midwest in the mid-1800s. The University of Wisconsin at Madison was a bastion of student protest in the 1960s, and remains a fountainhead of progressive thinking in America. But Wisconsin also gave rise in the 1950s to the vociferous Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose name would become forever wedded with Communist witch-hunting. Even today, I have a creeping sense that the liberal arts college I’m teaching in is the only liberal outpost in a staunchly conservative environment that loves beer, bratwurst, and a good foreign war.
Maybe worse than politics, there’s bloody murder. Picturesque, wholesome Wisconsin also spawned two of history’s worst serial killers: Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer. (Since you’re reading this on a nice Monday morning, I’m not going to spoil your week by giving you details of their gruesome deeds; try Google, but don’t eat too much steak or spaghetti before you do, because you’ll just throw it up).
But what am I doing talking about mass mayhem in a piece about small-town survival?
Like I said, last week’s great discovery for me was De Pere’s one and only thrift store – its ukay-ukay, if you will – on a city map. (We Pinoys have never, I think, been great map-readers, and many Manileños will be hard put to draw a map of their own city, despite the fact that our powerful homing instincts will carry us through any number of bus, jeepney, and tricycle rides to that corner in the maze of loobans we call home. The maps are etched in our subconscious, and any Filipino who loses his or her way is truly, pitifully lost.) With Beng sidelined by a bad toe and a wet chill wind that had blown into town, I resolved to reconnoiter the shop myself, darkly afraid of losing some yet-undiscovered treasure to a casual browser.
Fresh in my mind was a recent item in my Yahoo inbox from a mailing list called Kovels Komments, run by two of America’s most famous antique experts: "Last September a $15 piece of glass from a thrift store sold at a Green Valley Auction in Virginia for $22,000. There are less than eight known examples of this Boston & Sandwich Glass Co. tulip vase in dark cobalt blue with white striations." As a longtime thrift-shop and ukay-ukay fiend, I nurtured fantasies of finding a lost codex of Leonardo da Vinci’s, a first edition of Poe, or an unknown Rembrandt, or – heck, forget the foregoing – a 1927 Parker Duofold Senior fountain pen in mandarin yellow. (I’d found one in Milwaukee in 1989 for $68, then sold it a year later for $380; it now goes for around $1,500; if you think that’s lucky, ask a fellow Pinoy fictionist–whose name will go unmentioned for his own safety – who bought a $10 painting in a garage sale in the Midwest during his own grad-school days, only to be deliriously shocked to discover that it was by a minor American master, worth a thousand times over when my friend resold it.)
But thrift-shop treasure hunts aren’t really about stumbling on the kind of fortune that could send you cruising on the Caribbean while your workmates are slaving away at midterm exams and unintelligible critiques of some equally wretched novel. It’s about finding the familiar, and bringing it home for next to nothing – giving it a new home, actually. Thrift-shop wares are cast-offs, to be sure – things people no longer need, either because they’re on the move, or on the rise (or, just as likely, forever departed) – but their donation is well meant, never for money, a recognition of the enduring value of objects as much of charity itself. That may be a lot to say for what many people would dismiss as junk – and, indeed, it’s almost pathetic when the homeliest and also most useless of articles such as a clutch of chewed-up pencils won’t sell for even five cents – but, as they say, love comes in the most unexpected places, and so, serendipitously, do the best thrift-shop finds.
Bundled in a thick jogging suit, I ventured across the river in a drizzle to reach the shop before it closed, and was rewarded with two floors of gloriously uneven hand-me-downs, from brand-new T-shirts for 25 cents, used but smart and comfy penny loafers for 50 cents, any book for 10 cents. I’d been sent to find some extra utensils for our kitchen, which was easy enough to round up; I was, in fact, in a bit of a hurry to march on to the nearby department store, in need of an obscure computer part for an audiovisual presentation. The college had but one such part in its inventory, on loan to others; no store in town had it; I could’ve ordered it online for about $10, but it would take at least a week to get, and I needed it ASAP.
I was also looking for a coffee mug. If Sir Galahad and the Knights Templar had their Holy Grail, then I have my Holy Mug, that perfect vessel for the steaming coffee that keeps me awake and writing columns like this one. I’d bought one at ShopKo for $2.99, but remained unhappy. A coffee mug is a very personal and personalized thing, like a toothbrush or a pair of eyeglasses; I’m of the firm belief that these daily objects are very ones you shouldn’t scrimp on, but should endeavor to get the best – not necessarily the most expensive – of, to your satisfaction. The requisites for my ideal mug are fairly simple: neither too big nor too small, heavy enough to sit solidly on a table but not too thick-lipped, stylish but not dainty, easy to hold in one hand. Without too much trouble, I found it in a shelf full of mugs and cups of every sort, from fragile demitasses to the generic plaster productions you can stamp a logo and your nickname on. It was a brown stoneware mug with a bold floral design in deep blue – a definite steal at 25 cents.
Much more remarkable was a discovery upstairs, among the electronic knick-knacks, where I saw a man holding something like a thin beige snake in his hand – a snake with a flat head at either end – and heard him telling his wife, "I wonder what this is – I don’t know a darned thing about computers!" Well, I did, and was praying that he’d put the item down, because it was, against all odds, the very thing I’d been chasing down for days, on campus and on the Internet: a six-foot HD-15 male-to-male VGA extension cable to hook up my laptop to the classroom’s AV projector. The second that cable fell back on the shelf, I snatched it up.
This wasn’t just coincidence or serendipity, but a strange phenomenon that psychologists and paranormal researchers call synchronicity. That cable and I were meant for each other, fated to meet on the second floor of a church thrift shop in distant De Pere. I gladly paid a dollar for it, and, clutching my precious bag of goodies, set out for home. It was still drizzling, and seeing a rare bus come by, I boarded it, only to realize that it was going the other way, where I hadn’t ventured – downtown into the much larger city of Green Bay. Instead of a 15-minute ride I took a leisurely hour-long detour around the city, filing away useful landmarks (the Greyhound bus station, Ralph’s Antiques), mulling over the gifts of the afternoon.
On another visit to the shop, Beng and I would make even more wonderful discoveries – for her, a music box in the shape of a rocking horse perched on a drum; for me, a mint and working 1950s table clock – each of them for a dollar, which probably can’t go a longer way in this inflation-ravaged world than in far, trusting De Pere.