QualGlasses

Highest Bidder

Nine months ago, Roger and I attended one of those imagination charity benefit dinners – the generous that required long, dangly earrings and heels – and our first calm auction. We wandered the perimeter tables, totally uninterested in the Waterford crystal bowls and signed Dallas Cowboys jerseys and the artwork suspension on the walls. We bid on (and won) gift certificates to restaurants and playhouse tickets, excited to bid on something. We bid on them even though we to all appearance would have gone to those restaurants anyway and we chose to no longer clutch season tickets to the playhouse center. But there’s a new director there now, we reasoned, perhaps it would be worth trying again. We still port’t used those tickets.

As we continued to stray about throughout the ballroom, checking on our bids and ensuring we were the highest bidder (we’re nothing, if not prompted by emulation), we realized we hadn’t been to the center slab. The center table. We should have known it would have held the gold, the one substance we love more than anything else - travel. We gazed at the images of not the same items up for auction: weeks in Taos in a mansion-house that sleeps 17 or weeks in Colorado in a secluded lodge that slept 14 (we could bid our family on vacation!), trips to wineries, 500,000 of frequent occurrence flyer miles on either United or American Airlines, airfare and cabaret vouchers to a number of between nations destinations. We circled the slab like hawks trying for prey – undeniable there was something there for us. Something in our budget, I mean. And then we found it.

Occult behind a few other auction items was a pamphlet for a weekend stay at an Omni inn – any hotel in Boreal America, any weekend we wanted. And no one had bid on it. We fixed our sticker on the serving-boy, pushed the item back a minute further, then nonchalantly walked not present. Nothing to see there. We became obsessive about it. Every few minutes one of us would go on foot by, checking to see whether someone had outbid us. No one had. By the duration the dinner started, we determined to stop inspecting the auction sale – if someone was going to outbid us, we’d right have to deal with it. We made it fifteen minutes without checking.

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