The McCollumn - 7/30/10

Urn your keep

Those of us who have businesses in downtown Opelika are an interesting family of people.

We’re all sensitive and sympathetic to problems and issues faced by our fellow business owners, as we are either going through the same thing or have gone through it in the past.

We all try to help each other. That’s the way it should be.

Over the years, I’ve come to know Roland Lee, the owner and proprietor of Roland’s Thrift Store, quite well.

We couldn’t have asked for a better neighbor for the Cottage Walk.

Mr. Roland is one of the kindest people you will ever meet and his store is a treasure trove of randomness.

I’m never entirely sure what I’m going to find when I walk in there.

It could be a new dressmaker’s dummy, an antique tin bug repellent sprayer or a large cardboard cutout display of some NASCAR driver whose name I don’t and will never know.

I peruse the records constantly, hoping to find some album I think I desperately need (Case in point, I did find the original cast album of West Side Story – not too shabby).

You can find almost anything at Roland’s.

A few weeks ago, per usual, I was wandering around inside and saw a simple, wooden jewelry box sitting on the counter.

I picked it up, noticing it seemed far heavier than a normal jewelry box.

“What in here, Mr. Roland,” I asked.

“Open it,” he said.

I did.

Inside of the box was another large, crimson plastic box with a sticker on it that read “These are the cremated remains of …”

“These aren’t…” I said, hesitating to finish the sentence.

“They are,” Mr. Roland said. “Found them in a box of stuff I bought from some lady.”

Of course, Mr. Roland didn’t intend to buy human remains. There may be some odd items in his store, but the macabre is not a realm usually showcased in his store.

“Bad juju,” I said to Mr. Roland. “You need to send those back.”

Mr. Roland assured me he was going to and, as of this date, the remains have been safely returned to their proper owner.

(Actually, the returning of the ashes is also a funny story, but Mr. Roland tells it far better than I do. Stop by and have him recount the story for you. Worth a trip, I promise.)

Buying someone’s ashes, even accidentally, does stir up some odd feelings.

My immediate thought was that I was fairly certain that a few amendments to the US Constitution pretty much said you can’t buy people any more, even if they are in cinder form.

However, as I continued to think about the singular oddity of the thrift store’s human ashes, the dominant emotion was a sense of sadness.

It’s a grim future to have one’s eternal remains put into a box somewhere in the house and to be forgotten, sold with other trinkets and baubles like you don’t matter.

Even the worst among us doesn’t deserve the fate of being tossed out like that.

Keep track of your loved ones, dear readers.

Make sure Great Aunt Edna is still in that urn on top of your mantle.

I dare say I can speak for most of us when I say that we don’t want to see any more people for sale at Roland’s.