The Pledge

Perhaps this should be a workshop entry, but I'm more interested in saying something than writing something, if that makes sense.

The city I grew up in had one of those old-fashioned pawn shops, family-owned, downtown, a small two-story brick building whose first floor was crammed with everything from tools to tubas. I don’t know what lay behind the darkened upstairs windows, but I’m reasonably sure the first-generation owners once lived there. I sometimes visited it on my lunch hour, and picked up some good bargains. I never felt like I was taking advantage of anyone, merely playing my part in a real-life drama.


Nearly every piece in the shop had an obvious history, usually a hint of tragedy or disappointment or dashed dreams, but sometimes a suggestion of redemption (pun intended). A feeling that the original owner had moved on, to different and maybe better things. The owners and employees were tight-knit and knew their stuff. I would occasionally overhear some bargaining, and though there might be a bit of pleading or pain in the voice of the person seeking to pawn, I never heard a sneer from behind the counter. The place smacked of hard, maybe cruel, honesty, money at its most basic level. A rough fairness on both sides.


I have visited a pawnshop in the city where I live now, but it’s a megashop, a sort of junky K-Mart, everything stripped down to its basics, a moneyball business. Corporate ownership and hourly employees who could just as easily be working in Home Depot or an auto parts store. No doubt nice people, but with no interest in the trade. I doubt a life story gets treated as anything more than a sob story.


Still, I sometimes wander in, mostly to browse, sometimes to buy bargain tools or fishing gear (or “junk” as my wife might call it). One day I found an old tackle box, rusted and dented, the serious but sincere type, nothing fancy but obviously hard-used. When I opened it I found the usual detritus of the bank fisherman, a few lures of varying sizes, needle-nosed pliers, a spool of monofilament, some lead weights, a stringer, even a treble hook with dried remnants of a long-dead worm.


And a small bundle of band-aids bound with a rubber band.

In life one sometimes gets hurt, and the band-aids showed he had tried to prepare for it. But I’m sure he was never really prepared for whatever finally happened, whether he had to trade the box for money or whether he simply passed on and his heirs saw nothing more than a beat-up old box. Probably never even opened it, just got rid of it.


Junk or treasure. Whatever else one may call it, it was pledge never redeemed.