Every Business Starts Somewhere

This business began on our dining room table the night before Halloween. Here I am assembling the first batch of test kits. Not shown in the photo are the costumes laying on the same table, constructed hours earlier with hot glue and string. Oh the second lives we live after the kids are asleep. 

The idea for this business came to me when I found an old shoe box of my childhood letters at my parents' house. My parents still live in the same home that I grew up in, and I recall placing the box high up on the closet shelf years ago. At that time, I had been cleaning out my room and getting ready to leave for college. I knew myself well enough to anticipate that I would love finding those letters again one day.

It wasn't just the letters, or the charmingly irregular handwriting, or the magazine cutouts that were tucked into the envelopes. What gave me pause was the totality of it all. Things that, without context, become inscrutable, but together create a literal paper trail of an authentic life. In a word, provenance. 

The novel, The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt, comes to mind. It's a story about a boy's journey growing up, where many of the themes hearken back to lessons learned while working in an antiques shop. Taken under the wing of a fastidious furniture restorer, the main character explores the tensions between authenticity, fabrication, and the precarious nature of provenance in the antiques business, where sometimes an illegitimate claim to a piece of art can increase its very legitimacy.

The provenance of my box of letters is satisfyingly unmistakable. I think about this and what is lost in our digital world. Every so often I come across a news story on how artificial intelligence is making it easier to fake everything. Let me just stop here before I work myself up about the perils of the future unknown.

So, who can say when the idea for this letter writing business really started. If you go back far enough, it was probably there all along.