Beyond the South End

Auction Like You’ve Never Seen Before

 

I came across this piece one day not long ago when I was looking for something else. My mother used to send me clippings from the paper in the days when I didn’t subscribe to any Maine papers by mail. She had written on the side, “This is the guy who talks at people, he is funny.” Guess she didn’t know what to call Bob Skoglund. We knew him as the “Humble Farmer.” Maybe you remember him too. I believe I went to school with Bob one summer when I went to a summer session at Gorham State Teachers College, now part of the University of Maine. I think there was more than one Skoglund boy though, so I may be wrong. The last I remember seeing the “Humble Farmer” he had roller skates on his feet and was hanging onto a long rope attached to the car that was pulling him in the Lobster Festival Parade years ago. Anyway, here’s Bob’s idea of a wedding invitation as printed in the paper. This is the original head of the piece. I don’t know what paper it came from.

 

 

Friends, neighbors and the idly curious are invited to a pot

luck picnic and the noon wedding of

The wider Marsha vanZandbergen &

Robert Karl Skoglund, long time professional hermit

in the back yard of our home in St. George,

Saturday, June 22, 1991.

Invitation is by word of mouth – no invitations have been sent. Hopefully, we’ve remembered everybody. Wedding presents are most unwelcome. As a matter of fact, so cussed many valuables have collected alongside the junk in this old house for the past 180 years that I have declared a state of emergency and am holding an auction at 2 p.m. right after the wedding in hopes of making room for the bride and her yuppie accoutrements from her Camden condo.

Twenty-five years ago I bought old houses jammed with old junk. And every time I sold a house I dragged every scrap of it home and wedged it in here. No, I didn’t dare get rid of any of it, because I knew that sooner or later I’d marry The Almost-Perfect-Woman and when I did the first thing she’d say would be, “You mean that you had a sleigh-back widget and you sold it to Truman Hilt?”

But, for better or worse, she’s into plastic and chrome and don’t give a hoot for the old stuff so out it goes. The auction is my idea—she suggested we saw up everything and burn it in the furnace. Last year I found an 1895 brass dog license tag that she’d thrown in the trash. “How,” I asked, “could you throw out something that has set on that window sill since Mrs. Hannemann was in grade school?” I couldn’t argue with the logic in her reply, which was, “Well, what good is it?”

Please don’t eat and run. If you can’t see who’s bidding against you I can guarantee it’s not going to be my wife. She hopes to see you hauling off my intended dowry in a truck.