When I was 23, I found a globe bar at a garage sale. For those of you who didn’t grow up watching PBS murder mysteries, a globe bar is a big standing globe that opens up to reveal a hidden compartment, traditionally used to store bottles of liquor.
This one was gorgeous in a kitschy way, covered in sepia paper with sea monsters painted in the Pacific and zodiac signs around the rim. I glared at the other woman looking at the globe so hard she jumped when she noticed me and hurried away, then I swooped it up. I marveled at the ten dollar price tag written in permanent marker on masking tape stuck to the top dome. My boyfriend and his dad met me in line and congratulated me on my found treasure.
“Just this please,” I said to the woman sitting with her cash box at a little folding table. As I pulled out a ten dollar bill, my boyfriend’s dad ripped the price tag off with a flourish, taking a chunk of the painted paper with it.
The previous owner, my boyfriend, and I all dropped our jaws in unison. It took the dad a minute to realize what he’d done.
“It’s still good!” he insisted, and indeed, the torn strip of painted paper was perfectly intact as he eased it off the masking tape.
The owner and I looked at each other. I knew I couldn’t walk away now or this woman would definitely haunt me once she kicked the bucket, which from the look of her could be any day now. I handed her the money a little heartbroken, but assured the dad (and myself) that I could fix it.
Little did the globe bar know that this incident was only the beginning.
As fun and cool as it was, it was also very cheaply made. Or at least, cheap enough that it could not withstand regular use from a woman in her twenties. While well-loved, the bar’s pieces easily unscrewed or fell out, which meant that the top dome would occasionally come completely off. I also moved six times in nine years, and each move resulted in another lost or broken part. I glued back and replaced what I could, but often I just pretended like it wasn’t broken.
When we moved to Boston a few years ago, I began to see that this delicate, ramshackle tchotchke no longer fit my lifestyle. In addition to constantly falling apart, the charmingly small compartment could no longer hold our collection of alcohol, wine glasses, growlers, and other accessories. I started to imagine fixing it up and passing it on as a third date conversation starter to the next generation of twenty-somethings. After all, the absurdly proportioned continents and elaborate cardinal directions were still beautiful to look at. It would be shame to throw such a pretty thing away, I told myself.
But all I did was daydream. The bar remained as worn down as ever, sitting in a corner of our apartment.
In this most recent move to Salem, however, things started to get hard to ignore. In addition to the top coming off instead of opening on a hinge and the busted wooden base that I’d never gotten around to fixing, one of the globe’s wheels came off, so it was lopsided. The threading for attaching the wheel had been obliterated over time and it was officially too beyond repair to donate to anyone. I moved it from room to room trying to find a space for it, but it was always in the way.
The wheel that had fallen off sat on the kitchen counter. “I’ll fix it soon,” I kept telling my husband as we unpacked. One week went by, then another, and fewer and fewer boxes distracted us from the fact that there was a broken bar in the guest room.
Eventually, I admitted it was time to move on. I said my goodbyes to my whimsical companion of many a badly mixed drink, and looked away when Nathan carried it out to the dumpster.
We have a new bar cart now. It is also cheaply made (sometimes you have to buy what you can afford), and will no doubt eventually break down more quickly than I’d like. Still, it’s not actively broken, and since it’s made of metal and glass has a better chance of withstanding an adult lifestyle.
When it comes to being zero waste, the “zero” part is always a lie. It’s hard to throw out the things you love, but I’ve been trying to be mindful of when things are so not-useful that they just become waste that lives in your home. And with a broken hodgepodge of particle board, painted paper, metal and plastic, sometimes the only thing to do is to condemn it to the landfill.