The Regular Who Only Buys Glassware

There’s a woman who’s been coming to my sales for at least six or seven years now, I’ve genuinely lost count, who buys almost exclusively glassware, depression glass mostly, some carnival glass when she finds a good piece, and I could set a clock by her showing up within the first twenty minutes of a sale opening, heading straight for wherever I’ve got the glass laid out before she looks at anything else. I don’t know her last name. I know her grandson’s name because she talks about him constantly, and I know she reupholsters furniture on the side, and I know almost nothing else about her actual life outside what she buys and what she mentions in passing while she’s paying.

She cornered me at a sale a while back, mid-conversation about a piece of pressed glass she was deciding on, to ask if I’d ever tried a specific dice-heavy RPG board game her grandson wouldn’t stop talking about. I told her honestly I hadn’t, and she spent the next five minutes describing it in more detail than I think she realized, the character building, the dice-in-a-bag mechanic, clearly repeating almost word for word whatever her grandson had told her about it, enthusiasm secondhand but completely genuine.

I ended up buying it, mostly out of curiosity about what could get a woman who’s never once bought anything from my game tables this worked up secondhand. Two hundred dollars is not a small purchase to make on the recommendation of someone whose actual gaming opinions I have no way to verify, and I remember feeling a little foolish handing over that much money based on an animated retelling from someone who doesn’t even play. It turned out to be one of the best-produced things I own now, so credit where it’s due, hers and her grandson’s both, secondhand as the recommendation was.

What strikes me about her, thinking back over years of these same twenty-minute conversations, is how much of a relationship you can build with someone through nothing but recurring small transactions and the same few topics circled back to every time. I don’t know if she’d call us friends, and I’m not sure I would either, exactly, but there’s something real there anyway, built entirely out of glassware and a grandson I’ve never met and one dice game she talked me into that neither of us would’ve predicted going in.

She still buys glass almost exclusively, still shows up in that first twenty minutes, still mentions her grandson unprompted at least once per conversation. I still haven’t asked her last name, and at this point it feels too late to start, like admitting I never actually knew it this whole time would say more about the relationship than either of us really wants said out loud.