Once I was a bead seller. They called me “The Bead Lady”. I never knew I would grow up and be called a “Bead Lady”. “Bead Lady” is a name for an old lady, not a chic, hip lady antique dealer like I was. I bought beads on the mezzanine floor of the Pasadena Convention Center before the Bustamante Antique Show opened, bought them from an old lady who peddled them. She was shrewd and savvy and her prices were high. You would never guess how shrewd from looking at her bent over body, her long unstylish dress, her tattered old tweed coat with every other button missing and her old brimmed hat which protected her from the California sun and also from the rain. She looked like a homeless lady who never lived the good life, but oh! what beads she brought to tempt me. She said she was the one that strung them all but I doubt it. I think she got them just that way, this slovenly looking, unkempt old lady. She carried bags and bags of beads and a shabby suitcase also.

We sat together on the bench on the mezzanine floor of the Pasadena Convention Center overlooking the elegant displays on the ground floor of the Bustamante Antique show before the show opened. It was probably the worst place in the world to buy beads as it reminded the old crone that the dealers downstairs were getting plenty of money for their wares and of course that was true and , there again, also not true. The old crone’s prices were fixed as though they were written in blood. She did not take her eyes off me and she read every muscle of my face. She knew she had snared a live one. The beads she brought were old glass beads from Czechoslovakia, Bohemian red glass beads that looked like garnets, cobalt blue glass beads that befit a Czar or Czarina of Russia and emerald green beads so divine they reminded me of the legendary treasures of the Taj Mahal in India. The faux glass pearls in the mix could confuse an oyster. What this bead lady brought was a Kismet of color.

I became swept up in her treasures like a stranger in Paradise, my head, heart and ears resounding with song. This Kismet of hers was full of old beads from Middle Europe, Germany, the island of Murano in Italy, from France, Japan, China, and other places. I paid the old lady without a dicker, paid quickly as the show was about to start. I doubled the prices I paid for the beads and hoped that the business book I read on pricing antiques had made a mistake when it recommended tripling the cost of goods. Doubling seemed quite a lot to me but there again the space I rented from Mr. Bustamante was not free and neither was the fireproof wallpaper which Mr. Bustamante insisted the dealers use to decorate their spaces. Add to this the cost of gasoline for the van on a round trip of over eight hundred miles and hotel rates in Pasadena.

The choice was ours, mine and my husband’s. We could stay home, sit on the couch and watch television or join the other hopeful dealers, young and old, and meet customers and stay alive and engaged and committed to the antique business and its way of life where being old was an asset, where old people were not shelved but were respected, a personal link to past decades, and customers trusted us to tell the truth. They often asked “You wore these beads, didn’t you? These are your very own beads” they said hopefully and lovingly.

People were waiting at our booth when we arrived downstairs in the garage section of the Bustamante show in the Convention Center. Jerry, the rug dealer, was already showing his rugs to one of his early bird movie-set customers. I wanted to be one of Jerry’s first customers as he often brought strands of American Indian Silver handmade beads and Navajo and Zuni jewelry he collected at the shows he did each summer in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He drove to Santa Fe from his home near Berkeley, California. He visited trading posts in Arizona and New Mexico. His bolos and bracelets and Katchina dolls were authentic Native American art. He visited the pueblo of Santa Domingo to acquire the mosaic inlaid large shell necklaces for which the pueblo is famous.

We had no time to spare. I needed to help my husband uncover our own showcases and take care of our business and start selling. What we used as covers throughout our career at the shows were cotton twin-sized hand-blocked tree of life and madras plain cotton bedspreads from India bought from the Cost Plus store near Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco in 1959. These bedspreads had graced our children’s beds until they went off to college. Their light weight and generous size, their subtle colors, pink, maroon and faded black, adequately covered our sixteen foot corner space at the Pasadena show in the early 1990’s. The morning and evening ritual of uncovering and covering the showcases reminded me of our days as younger parents who lived with our children in Sacramento, California in 1959 before there was a freeway to San Francisco. We were impressionable newcomers to the West Coast soaking up the wonders of our new environment and enjoying the pleasures of the Nut Tree, a destination just then built halfway to San Francisco with its original giftware displays, its delicious foods, its gardens and its large indoor aviaries with colorful noisy talking birds and its small railroad which amused adults and children alike. There was a viable airport where guests flew in from their inland and coastal ranches.

At the shows I was in charge of the showcase displays. My husband was in charge of the lighting. We wanted our space to be welcoming and we kept our nine showcases half open creating a slanted surface with a lamp clipped to the middle of each case directed downwards and a series of clips from office supply stores on either side of the lamp. Glass necklaces hung from the clips, a cascade of glass beads enhanced by the light, a glistening curtain of beads. It helped me to organize the showcases by color as much as possible and coordinate the top layer of hanging beads with the objects on the floor of the showcase. Customers would part the curtain of beads to see the mysterious treasures. Set-up took me at least a full day because of our large stock and the variety of objects, and no matter how much experience I had I could never hasten the task. Every show was a new challenge, a new exhibit hall, additional new old objects, an unexpected leak in the ceiling, or a disgruntled neighbor. Set-up was reunion time with other dealers and pack-up, although a lengthy process, involved “Drive carefully,” “See you down the road” or “Take care.” Dealers had to be cooperative, civilized, buddy-like or they were marked “lousy” and were shaken out of the group.

Our first customer in Pasadena was an attractive lady who was accompanied by her husband. She tried on various necklaces of the ones I had just purchased and her husband told her she looked beautiful in every one of them. At the next show we did in Pasadena the husband came alone and bought up a storm. It happened more than once that the old bead necklaces intrigued the husbands more than the wives. Perhaps they remembered seeing photographs of their grandmothers, mothers, sisters and aunts wearing such necklaces. I never questioned my good fortune and always thanked the buyers.

We did a show in Fresno. We liked the friendly Armenian customers at the show. We also enjoyed eating at the Basque restaurant in downtown Fresno where retired sheepherders ate with visitors like us and lived in quarters above the dining room. One of our customers was a man whose wife was studying Philosophy and Comparative Religion at a college in southern California. She was living away from home because she needed the school library and Fresno was a long commute. Her husband stayed home to work and pay for his wife’s tuition and take care of their teenage sons. The husband bought beads from us, examples of every bead I brought. He researched the beads, their histories, their various mediums, glass, clay, metal, wood and stone and their countries and continents of origin. I was his mentor and helped him build a home library. He enjoyed the colors and shapes of the beads. He became drawn to the language of beads as many beads spoke in symbolic language, some beads were for pubescent males and some for unmarried females. There were beads that healed you and others that protected you from the evils of the evil eye. Some beads were said to enhance fertility and they warded off even sophisticated female buyers at the Fresno show.

The bead collector husband stored his beads in a large carved camphor wood trunk from China, almost behaving like a bride who assembled an exotic trousseau. He worked hard all day at the construction site of the company he owned and he relaxed with his beads in the evening after he and his sons enjoyed their dinner. Beads became his preferred pastime. Touching the beads, hypnotized by their beauty brought him peace and relaxation. He felt their magic and they never failed him. His wife eventually got her degrees, from B.A.to Phd. in Philosophy and Comparative Religion. She became a professor at a local college. Their sons grew up and married. The husband had by then brought himself considerable glory by lecturing with slides and bead specimens at Toastmasters breakfasts, at the Rotary Club, at the Oddfellows and at the Chamber of Commerce. He joined the Bead Society closest to Fresno. He traveled to bead conventions and museum show openings from Los Angeles, to Tuscon, to Santa Fe, and to Bangor, Maine. No place was too remote for him to fly in his private jet. He appeared in valley newspapers standing high on a steel girder during the construction of one of his tall buildings. He was wearing his work clothes and hard hat and a wide woven leather belt with a large silver and turquoise Navajo buckle. I could clearly see that hanging from the leather belt was the Tibetan mala, the prayer beads he bought from me. I remember counting the beads with him, all 108 prayer beads to make sure they were all there. In another photograph worthy of the National Geographic my customer was being awarded an honorary degree in “ Cultural Anthropology, Body Image and Personal Adornment” by the college at which his wife was employed. His picture in black cap with tassel and black gown appeared in many places including the Modesto Bee. He is seen wearing a smooth white chank shell from Nagaland, a shell from a now extinct species, a shell with medicinal properties. Our customer, the husband, had bought the shell from me, tied it onto a suede thong and was wearing it proudly around his neck and on his chest as he marched forward to receive his honorary degree. He thanked the president of his wife’s college for the distinction bestowed upon him. His eyes met mine and he thanked me silently as my husband and I were seated in the special section of the great white canvas tent which protected the graduates and honorees and guests like us from the valley heat. Ice cold water was never so sweet.

We had devoted bead followers at the antique shows in Sacramento, Auburn, Truckee, South Lake Tahoe, Reno, Carson City and Henderson, Nevada. We had followers in San Francisco, San Rafael, San Anselmo, Santa Rosa, Healdsburg, Mendocino, Chico, and Redding in California. We received letters and pictures of beaded necklaces, created from our beads and exhibited in vetted art shows. Belly dancing teachers and students wrote us for more one-of-a-kind pendants, boxes and belts from Pakistan made by Afghani refugees, and from Kashmir and from India and from the Tuareg peoples of the Sahara Desert with their distinctive crosses and mixed metal prayer boxes. We sold rare leather antique flint holders from Tibet. Designers sometimes hung these curious little purses from a sacred bead necklace they assembled. We bought our treasures directly from vendors braver than ourselves, vendors who trekked through dangerous mountain passes and valleys in Asia to acquire their goods, ate unfamiliar exotic foods and dealt with U.S. customs officers and international red tape. We were fortunate when customers who had lived and worked in Saudi Arabia sold us old Berber necklaces and hair ornaments they collected, or when engineers working in Venezuela brought us hand-woven baskets made by natives of the Orinoco River basin, baskets so finely woven they could hold water and store foodstuffs. The baskets blended well with our beads.

Our small business had gone global! Of necessity we carried an atlas to point out Baluchistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan where many beads were created as well as Turkey, Greece, Mongolia, Nepal, China, Taiwan, Korea and the Philippines. Old age for us had been held in abeyance by the excitement of our chosen careers as antique dealers after my husband’s forty-five years as a civil engineer in many different places and the phasing out of my clinical social work private psychotherapy practice on Union and Gough streets in San Francisco. It always pained me when customers, embarrassed by their ignorance, ridiculed our ethnic merchandise and made loud negative comments about the unusual, unfamiliar nature of tribal jewelry. “Who would wear this stuff?” they asked. To me they were the Ugly Americans, the tourists I remember in Korea who sifted through the rice bins and said “ Who would eat such food ?” or “ The workmanship here is shoddy!” forgetting that after all they were guests in our space or in someone else’s homeland.

The time had come when we could no longer deny that our combined ages totaled 168 years. Our trusty van was getting older and less reliable. 9/11 did not help sales any and there was a war in Iraq. Here and there our customers left to fight overseas. Fewer adventurous vendors went to remote regions of the world to search for merchandise. It was time for us to say “good-bye.” Letters came from concerned customers wondering if we were well. The tattoo artist, that quiet refined gentleman who scrutinized the carved wood dragon beads from China for just the right dragon facial expressions, who bought all the silver metal Hands of Fatima I had for sale from the Middle East, and the Merlins, the magician pins manufactured in Provincetown, R.I., that tattoo artist gave up his tattoo parlor and moved somewhere else as he had slowly exhausted his pool of customers over the years.

It was a beautiful Spring day, the last Sunday of May, 2005. Our son and daughter-in-law, visiting from Ohio, decided to take us to the Anthropology Museum on the U.C. Berkeley campus in their shiny white rented car. We would see the exhibit “Hidden Treasures from the Mexican Collection.” After viewing the exhibit we walked on Bancroft to Telegraph Avenue and mingled with Sunday crowds of bead buyers and fast food eaters. I thought about the student demonstrations and protests of the 1960’s, not only in Berkeley but all over the country and close-by at San Francisco State University where I was studying social work and where the semanticist S. I. Hayakowa was at the helm and there was uproar on campus and demands for ‘relevant education.’ I had been thinking of freeing my beads for some time and later that evening before going to bed I took a strong scissors, cut loose a hank of necklaces, cut the beads loose from the knots and cords that bound them, let the beads drop to the floor, necklace after necklace, bead after bead, popping and rolling on the tile floor and into the corners of the dining room and into the grooves of the grout between the tiles. I slept soundly that night dreaming of the melange, the medley of colorful beads on the condo floor, beads I had emancipated.

It must have happened while I slept. The next day the dining room table and the dining room chair seats were topped with bead boards full of mixed beads, not a bead on the floor. The beads had quietly returned of their own volition and were waiting patiently for some younger bead lady to reorganize them, rearrange them, experiment with new designs, sell them to lady anchors on the TV networks, figure out a way to tempt the male announcers, adorn the ears, necks, wrists, waists and ankles of gypsy dancers and continue happily vagabonding with them all over the place.