A tall lean neatly trimmed man comes into my store. He looks tired, off kilter. When I see the adeptly packed station wagon out front it begins to make sense. His mother in law has died. He is doing what he can for his wife at a time when nothing he does can be enough. What he has managed to do is pack her mother's clothes and bring them to me. My resistance melts away and I am happy to ignore the "by appointment" sign on the door.

A few minutes later I am in the back room sorting the dresses and jackets by color, checking the pockets for hairpins and pencils, tossing them in the washer - making them mine while preparing them for their new life with someone else. As a dealer of vintage clothing I am hunter-gatherer, curator, anthropologist, amateur grief counselor and ultimately adoption agent, usually all in the same day.

You can tell a lot from what people, alive or not, leave behind in their pockets. Things they treasured, or just happened to have on them the last time they wore something, come to me and become part of the narrative I weave. Crisp neat purses that still have the matching change purse, mirror, and sometimes even their original store receipt inside them 50 years later point to a tidy ordered life. Maybe too tidy. The matches from Martha and Sam's wedding in 1971 tell me a 70's tux jacket was not worn often. But the leather vest, hand made here in Syracuse by Middle Earth Leather, is well worn, well loved and still in incredible shape - it harkens to the heyday of hippie craftsmanship. Still, the crumbs of pot in the pocket are a funny little surprises. And who doesn't like surprises? Mall shoppers, I guess.

I think some people enjoy stores in malls, with shiny new shelves full of identical clothes, just because nothing will be too surprising. It's like a contained indoor hunt for drugged overfed captive prey. And I think they like the illusion that when the natural chaos of life does have its way with us we can begin again, if not with a new body at least with new clothes. Safe under the heavenly blinding glare of flourescent lights, we like to think we can cheat death by shopping.

Well, it's worth a try. But over at my store (which, by the way, is clean and cozy and smells nice) the selection is, just like life, more complicated than that. Everything is one-of-a-kind. Each piece is a different color, different cut, different size, and nothing has been pre-selected by the Fashion Machine for your consumption. It's up to you to decide what is attractive. You might fall in love with a sleek black dress from the sixties, but if it doesn't fit, it doesn't fit. Like your first love, there is only one, and if it doesn't work out, you move on, albeit changed by the experience.

A frustrated customer once looked through some racks, threw her hands up and exclaimed to her boyfriend "It's all so RANDOM!" It's like Old Navy is a Catholic mass, scripted, predictable, and a vintage store is a Buddhist retreat, asking you to accept the refreshing variety and possibilities in the same breath that you accept the discomfort and disappointment.

The allure of vintage clothing is that it has value beyond being new. Not by virtue of being old, and not necessarily because it's from a particular era or has a certain provenance. Yes, it is about quality and variety and opportunities to redefine ourselves outside of today's corporate norm. But it is also about having a deep understanding that real life is not shiny. It doesn't come packaged as ready-to-wear. Real life is throbbing and pulsing change. That is the one certainty on which we can depend: real life is messy. It's vibrant. It spirals, it oozes, it lunges off the chart, if there even is a chart. It's all so random! Yes. It's random like life. And it's our choice, every day, whether we throw our hands up in despair or in joy.