From Trash to Treasure

My grandmother used to say, “One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.”

No one embodied that saying more than my brother Paul. He saw treasure where others saw castoffs. His holy grail was the Goodwill, and he shopped there almost weekly. At Christmas, he was surely one of their best customers.

Every year, he’d come through the front door on Walnut Street wearing a Santa hat and carrying two bulging trash bags filled with gifts he found at the Goodwill.

He’d pull each of our gifts from the bags, sometimes wrapped in comic-strip newspaper, birthday paper, or— one memorable year—Hanukkah paper. To Paul, wrapping paper was wrapping paper. It was the gift inside that mattered.

One year, he gave each of us board games that had clearly been opened and played, with no instructions and most of the pieces missing.

Another year, he walked through the front door wearing a llama coat, real llama. It looked as though the llama had roamed the Himalayas for decades before a hunter tracked it down and turned its fur into a coat. How it traveled from the mountains of Tibet to a Goodwill store in Waldo remains one of life’s great mysteries.

The poor llama probably survived blizzards, wolves, and mountain passes only to meet its fate in a Missouri thrift store and eventually end up on my brother’s back.

It may have actually been raccoon, but to us it was pure llama—wild, shaggy, and possibly road kill.

That same year, he gave me a mink stole. He pulled it from the trash bag and handed it to me as if he were presenting a small animal sacrifice.

At first, I just stared at it, not really knowing what I was holding.

“Put it on,” he said.

He helped drape it over my shoulders as though he was draping the Queen of England.

“Do you like it?”

Tiny fur particles danced in the air as I let out a loud sneeze.

“It’s beautiful,”I said.

“I’ve had it in layaway at Goodwill,” he said proudly.

I had no idea Goodwill had layaway.

Every year, my family and I looked forward to Paul’s gifts. We wondered what odd treasure he would reach down into those trash bags and pull out next. With Paul, Christmas was less about what you wanted and more about what Goodwill had to offer.