This morning as I was walking around the neighborhood looking at peoples’ gardens, verges, and doors, I yearned to be in Spain. It was the doors that did it: I have a collection of Spanish door photos. Then I thought, walking in Spain is calming and engaging because one does not know the stories of those gardens and streets, the people behind the doors. There is no back story. So, there is no sense of aging and one’s own past. The past we see walking in Spain is a storied one that does not hurt or disturb. There is no reminder of mortality and life ebbing.

  I sometimes look at a cafe or bar or a park here in my home city, and a picture rises of another life. Sometimes there is just a feeling of absence.

The old Opportunity Shop on High Street, for example, has gone without a trace. My women friends and I used to go there regularly, and the kids would pull all the toys out and run around and yell while we pulled out assorted clothes from a huge overflowing pile and tried them on. We went there, we said, to find baby baths, highchairs and woolies, toys for the kids, as well as assorted saucepans and cooking utensils. Of course, just incidentally, we found a lot of clothes which we tried on and paraded around happily while our children played with the toys or whatever they could grab. Sometimes, depending on how much cash we had, we bought a dress or pair of pants. 

 A huge part of the morning’s fun was our time with the manager. Sue was the storer of stories, a gifted the storyteller. We were attended to and talked at nonstop by Sue – a short, overweight, scruffily dressed, chain smoking woman in her thirties, I guess. She was the funniest and most big-hearted woman. Her attendant was Gary, also chain-smoking while he pretended to work: a grey haired, lazy guy, with a very strong stutter. His teeth were missing too so that didn’t help. But he was always up for a talk.

 Every scrap of clothing at our favorite Op Shop stunk of smoke. Obviously, the fact that the previous Op Shop, next to the old traffic bridge, had been burnt down, did not deter the smokers. An amusing embellishment to that story was the description of Gary running around in a negligee and high heels as the firemen arrived.

Now, 30 odd years later, there are three “Op shops” (More ‘Retro” than Op) in High Street. The stores are tidy, well organized, pricier, and frequented mainly by better dressed people, minus kids. The place where Sue and Gary wielded some power by the sheer force of their combined personalities is a very attractive cafe bar. Only the skeleton of the building remains. In this minimalist, clean, organized space some of us can still be found: the hippyish housewives who used to frequent the Anglican Op shop to escape our house with our kids for free entertainment and lifting of spirits /Op shop addiction feed. Older now, we sit alone or with a partner, sipping cappuccinos under umbrellas along a still tiny, still a little bit messy, tidied up Fremantle.

I will add some High Street photos to this blog.

For some Op shop pieces read Sambasue21.blog.

Hola Susana ‘ What do you see?’(7/10/23

In Praise of Opportunity Shops (6/9/22)