THIS ITEM HAS BEEN PREVIOUSLY ENJOYED.

When I was a kid, my grandmother was a flea market vendor. She’d buy cheap crap at wholesale, like playing cards and cosmetics, and mark it up for a small profit. She rounded out her stable of items with crafts she’d make in her spare time—the one I remember most clearly was a granny doll head glued onto a Renuzit air freshener, which she’d then sew a “dress” to fit. We’d get up at five in the morning, pack her Honda with boxes, drink coffee and eat donuts, and sell stuff. I’d walk around the place buying trinkets and talking to people. It all started me down a path whereby no matter where I travel, I seek out a flea market.

I buy things sometimes, although not that often. Mostly, I like to go to look at the stuff each vendor brings, and connect it in my head to the larger world. There are a lot of cheap sunglasses, low-quality housewares, and happenstance items that people get new, for cheap, and try to sell. The people who sell these things are all business—it’s not so much a personal venture as a money-making one. These small-scale entrepreneurs yell out come-ons to those milling around, offer special deals, and hustle cash out of objects with little real value. Wall hangings, lead paint-covered toys, posters of classic rock bands in cheap frames, off-brand toothpaste, flyswatters—the stuff moves somehow. It’s an impressive routine.

The entrepreneurs, who seem to make the most money, are not nearly as spellbinding as the woolies, who likely make the least. This shifty group is comprised of dudes who have procured a bunch of junk, through what may be questionable means, and are now attempting to sell it to a less-than-enthusiastic crowd. They’re just trying out this whole flea market thing, seeing how it goes, hanging out and hoping to swindle somebody out of a buck or two. I once ran into an exemplary pair of woolies that typified the group so well that I thought they might have been an apparition. These two had a single card table heavy with crappy old books—the kind of table I approach excitedly, and quickly realize the books are useless, unattractive, and devoid even of kitsch value—and they sat, slightly bored, just beyond it. The first guy I saw was heavy and hairy, sitting on an old couch, drinking a beer and perusing the crowd. He wore jeans and an 80’s-style concert t-shirt which was really more of a bib, because he had cut off the sleeves and back, leaving only the neck and front. Then I spotted the other guy. Lanky, dirty blond, and with a similarly distressed look, he sat in the cab of their Ryder truck, looking at a porno magazine and draining a Bud Light. Flustered, I made a move to pick up a book but dropped it as the first guy chuckled “100% prime meat,” clearly regarding a scantily-clad woman passing by.

The spectacle of the wooly is a major draw. I know people like these guys exist, but it really takes a flea market or a county fair to get them out of the woodwork. They’re sleazy, and their stuff sucks, but they’re in it for the party, and I just kind of admire that.

Then, though, there are the lifers. For me, the lifers are the jackpot. I can spot a lifer a mile away. There is usually an old station wagon or van involved, on the hood of which a blanket or tablecloth holds an array of older items that are gorgeous in their faded, roughened utility. One or more sometimes grizzled people sit with the items, chatting up passers-by, wheeling and dealing, and talking up stuff they appear not to want to part with.

There’s that whole thing about some visual artists getting so attached to their work that they don’t want to sell it, even if there’s a buyer standing in front of them, checkbook open. I think it’s the same with the really devoted flea market vendors. One guy I met, at the now-defunct Rocky Hill Flea Market in Warwick, Rhode Island, had the coolest variety of stuff from the 50s, all of it a bit haggard and lovelorn, but stunning in its maudlin grime. I stood there for an hour, looking through rusty I LIKE IKE buttons and cracked old watchbands.

The guy said he sometimes screens buyers. He just doesn’t like to sell stuff to people who won’t really appreciate it, who won’t continue to use it and prize it like he does. I thought, how in the hell does this guy make any money? and then I realized he probably doesn’t care much about profit. This guy would hunt down cool items, hoard them, and sell them only when he was damn well ready. I guess I passed the test, because I bought a slightly rusty Dutch Modern lamp that still leans a little to the right, and a psychedelic screenprint on glass that has since cracked right down the middle. I think about that guy sometimes, and wonder where he’s showing his stuff now.

That’s the thing—the lifers show their collections. They curate. They’re the proprietors of tiny roving museums filled with imperfect objects that show age, and wear, and dirt. When you go to a “real” museum, things are laid out just so—they’re beautiful, and usually gleaming with disuse. They’re extraordinarily valuable. And they’re set apart from the viewer so they stay that way. But the objects set out by flea market curators have a popular history. Someone I’ll never know used them somewhere, sometime in the past. There’s a haunting emotional past for every item—it lived in someone’s home, through winters and summers, and probably through births and deaths. The lifers have an appreciation for that fact.

They’re not going to tell me that, though. It’s sort of a subtext of the whole transaction. It’s not evident in a quick glance at somebody’s table, but when I get talking to some vendors, I start to get glimmers of it. They’ll rattle off a bunch of facts, a short history of this particular model, that particular glaze, which factory it rolled out of, and that’s when I get psyched, because I have a lifer on my hands.

I love dedication, and I love permanence. The lifer is my friend.