Showerthought: I passed on a perfect old camera for a broken music box

At a yard sale in Tacoma, I had to pick between a working 1970s Polaroid for $30 or a tarnished brass music box for $5 that wouldn't play. Everyone there said to grab the camera, it was the smart choice. I went with the music box because the inside lid had a tiny, handwritten map. After a week of fiddling, I got it to play a tune I'd never heard. The map led to a geocache note from 1998 hidden in a local park. Has anyone else picked the weird, broken thing over the obvious good find and had it pay off?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_wren2mo ago

Totally get that. I once bought a box of ruined photos at a flea market for like two bucks because one had my street name written on the back. Turned out to be pictures of my house from the 1920s, way before my family lived there. The guy running the stall thought I was nuts for passing on a nice lamp. I mean, the lamp would have just been a lamp, you know?

jason_fisher41mo ago

Okay but come on, how often does that actually happen? For every one magic photo box, there are a thousand boxes of just random junk. Most of the time a broken thing is just broken, and the story you find is just about someone else's boring trash. I feel like we only hear about the crazy wins, not the times you buy a stained book and it's just a stained book.

campbell.mary2mo ago

My aunt's garage sale in Spokane had a similar vibe last summer. I picked a water-damaged cookbook over a perfectly good set of dishes because it had notes in the margins. Those notes turned out to be my great-grandma's recipes, which my mom thought were lost forever. Sometimes the broken thing has the real story, and you just have to trust that weird little pull. Your music box find is honestly magical.