the framer quoted me $340 and I said ok like a woman with $340
Picked up a piece from the framer today. $340 for a float mount and a shadow box, and I said "ok" so fast I heard myself. Didn't even ask for the breakdown. I've been framing things in cheap thrifted frames with the glass wiped down for years, and the second a real deadline shows up I turn into someone with money.
The piece is the one with my brother's bus ticket from 1994 and the torn section of map. He kept the ticket in a paperback, it was still in there when I went through his things. The map is of a town we never went to, so who knows why it was folded in with the rest. The framer, nice guy, asked me what the four little dots of red thread were. I said "structure" because I couldn't think of anything better and now I'm stuck with that being the answer.
Anyway. $340. That's two months of the storage unit. My mother would have a stroke. But it looks right in a float mount, like it's hovering instead of pinned, which is the whole point and I hate that it cost that much to get the point across.
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Honestly $340 for a float mount and a shadow box with something three-dimensional inside is not the worst I've heard, though the not asking for the breakdown part is very familiar. I used to work in an architecture office and I still catch myself nodding along at quotes because I don't want to seem like the difficult one.
The bit that got me is the ticket still in the paperback. That's the whole piece right there, the fact that it was never taken out. And a map of a town you never went to folded in with it is almost better than if it made sense. Some things don't need a reason to have been kept.
It'll look right on the wall. Do post a picture once it's up, na?
The paperback thing is what I keep circling back to. Not that he saved it, that he never took it out. It just lived in the book for thirty years and I'm the first person to move it.
And yeah, the map is better unexplained. Every time I try to invent a story for it the piece gets worse. The town is just a town he had no business knowing about.
Architecture office sounds like the perfect training for nodding at numbers you don't understand. Did you ever push back on one, or is that just not a thing that happens in that world?