Happy Election Day from Honest Abe(s)

In honor of this day that I've been anticipating with a mix of dread/longing/horror/anxiety/excitement/fear/loathing/nausea/etc, I bring you the craggy visage of America's greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, to ponder.

I was drawn to this sale because of its piquant description in the estate-sale company's email newsletter. They said it was at the home of a clergyman who was relocating to another country because he'd been given a new job. This brought to mind so many of my favorite novels—by Barbara Pym, Jane Austen, Trollope—where some curate or vicar moves to a parsonage because he's been given a "new living." When I find things that usually happen in novels are happening in life, right down the road in the next subdivision, I have to see the evidence.

I don't think Abe Lincoln was mentioned in the estate-sale ad at all. Which seems like a bit of an oversight, considering this otherwise unexceptional suburban home was crowded with Lincolns. Identical Lincolns, hand-carved and signed, all $645 apiece. It was surprising to see Lincolns presiding over the living room, and then in the master bedroom, but to turn a corner from the kitchen into the laundry room and find the washer and dryer covered with $645 Lincolns? That's when things go from the merely surprising to the marvelous.

We'll never know why the globetrotting clergyman had to shed his Lincolns for a new life. Maybe he just needed to travel light. Barbara Pym would probably come up with a better angle on that plot. Anyway, it's something to consider in lieu of obsessing over the exit polls today.

Another pleasant diversion: the trailer for the new Spielberg biopic about Lincoln starring Daniel Day-Lewis. So. Awesome.

Strange bedfellows?

Something I've noticed on my estate sale travels is that bookshelves stocked with Bibles, religious tracts and volumes devoted to Christianity are likely to be sharing equal space with books whose esoteric subjects were probably featured on Leonard Nimoy's 1981 TV series In Search of. The Prophecies of Nostradamus. Chariots of the Gods. Anything on Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, Pyramid Power, poltergeists, UFOs, Easter Island and Nessie. I can't even tell you how often I've observed this Mysterious Phenomenon. What does it all mean? If only Leonard Nimoy would explain it to me.

The bald and the beautiful

Here we have another estate-sale enigma, which has collected dust in my: childhood bedroom, college dorms, a dozen or so NYC apartments, my home office here at HQ. Yes, she looks like a bald, Bambi-blue-eyed lightbulb, but seriously, what is she? What's with the holes? (Insert your own I-need-another-enigmatic-tchotchke-like-I-need-a-hole-in-my-head joke here.)

Later, gator

I bought this little plate at a flea market in Healdsburg, California, ten Memorial Day weekends ago. I was in Sonoma for a fabulous and incredibly fun destination wedding. The marriage that resulted has long since unraveled (for the better for all involved—or at least for the groom, which I say as a Friend of the Groom), but I still have the plate, along with a bunch of other stuff I bought at that market, which was surprisingly awesome considering the fancy-shmancieness of Sonoma and all the well-heeled winos who vacation there.

I've mentioned my affection for anthropomorphized houses; well, anthropomorphized animals give me a similar fuzzy feeling—when they're done well. There's a lot of sheep wearing hats and owls wearing glasses out in the world; one must be picky. This totally chill alligator (or is it a crocodile? I've never gotten the difference straight and there never seems to be a small child around to answer the question when it needs answering) spoke to me. It said "Yep." Seriously, the use of speech bubbles in pottery—how often do you see that motif? This Adair person, presumably an amateur potter potting in the 1940s, rocked. And not that I had any doubt that I'd be buying this $5 plate as soon as I laid eyes on it, but when I turned it over, the name sealed the deal. Adair happens to be Lindsay's middle name, as well as a family name. He lobbied hard to pass it on to one of our daughters, but I refused on the grounds that they were already getting his last name and how much of a tool of the patriarchy did he take me for?

Still, it's a cool name, and gave me that happy kismet feeling you get now and then at a flea market—there's nothing like feeling doubly justified in buying something. I've since searched the internets high and low for evidence of this Adair person but no luck. You can't think this was the only object he/she made, right?

Enigmatic object #1: The key to your dreams?

Right, so what is this all about? I've been buying scarves at estate sales from Day One—not because it's so chilly here in South Texas nor because I feel bad about my neck (yet)—but mostly to appease my children, both of whom have attended baby music classes that involved lots of Dances of the Seven Veils, baby-style, to music I wish I could forget but can't. I soon figured out that a half dozen "magic silks" or whatever they call them in catalogs like Magic Cabin and Hearthsong will run you $75 whereas estate sale scarves generally cost $2 to $5 apiece and come in every imaginable color, pattern, size and material. We've amassed a fantastic collection, which is kept in a Santa-sized drawstring sack that gets dragged out whenever somebody feels the urge to roll around in scarves, make scarf storms, scarf roads, scarf ghosts, scarf dog clothes, long knotted scarf ropes, scarf saris, scarf hats, scarf hair, or invent new and better scarf dances. Sadly, that doesn't happen quite as often as it once did; nevertheless if I come across a good scarf or five at a sale (usually they're piled up in a bedroom), I rarely pass it up.

This scarf, however, is a different case. I did not buy it for the kids; I bought it for me. And I didn't buy it to wear (red is so not my color) but just to wonder about. What is it, dammit? A fortune-telling game? How does it work? Did it come with accessories—dice, game pieces, a wheel of fortune? I dunno, but it's been annoying me with its stubborn mystery for a few years now. If anyone knows, tell me.

Bananas for budgies

I think I first learned about this Forgotten Bookmarks guy in Country Living magazine. Yes, I am a dinosaur who often gets her information from these things called magazines. Anyway, seems he's fellow dino, though a few key differences lie between us: He appears to sell his books for an honest living whereas I allow mine to pile up around me till I'm forced to devote a weekend to dividing them into neat new stacks, some of which are marked "to sell" and others "to give away," at which point they begin to gather fresh new dust, and remain unsold and ungiven, and are eventually engulfed by new piles, undivided, unorganized, un-neatened until I start the whole process all over again. No, this guy has an actual store and he also has a clear and simple idea behind his blog: sharing the cool and often poignant or odd things he finds inside old books. So it's no surprise he also landed a book deal. This blog wishes it were so straightforward. Like the name—thingummery—what does that even mean?

Oh, whatever, I don't know. I do know that I too collect the bonus oddities I find sandwiched between the pages of old books and periodicals. I also wonder how they ended up there and I feel badly about separating them. Like my favorite, the stripper card in the sewing book, which I wrote about here. And here we have another example, though it's not quite as titillating.

I bought this copy of Bananas magazine at one of those filthy, moldy, willies-giving sales that always have the best stuff and it's almost all too damaged to buy. HATE that. But I certainly couldn't resist a copy of Bananas with Willie Ames on the cover. Eight is Enough said, am I right? I'm such a prehistoric creature that I used to buy this ’70s-’80s pop culture magazine, the poor relation of Dynamite, at the Scholastic Bookmobile. As I was thumbing through the issue and trying not to get cooties (seriously, it looks like it spent the last decades languishing on someone's bathroom floor), this Polaroid portrait of a parakeet fell into my lap. As the owner of a pair of caged birds (zebra finches), I sympathize with the photographer, who probably just wanted a snap of his/her pet but ran up against a hard truth: Caged birds don't make good subjects. The pictures are all cage and very little bird.

Anyhoo, parakeets kind of give me a bad feeling because I had one as a kid. My parents gave him to me for my birthday, though I don't recall ever asking for or wanting bird. I'm thinking they were just trying to make me stop pining for a pony. I remember going to the pet store and peering into this big glass tank set into the wall and it was just a blur of blue and green wings. I kept trying to point to the one I wanted and I'm pretty sure the pet store guy just gave me the first one he could catch. Maybe I held that against the bird because I named him Sinbad, after my favorite movie, and never paid him much attention after that. I thought he was kind of gross. I never let him out of his cage and I didn't make more than a half-hearted effort to teach him to talk. Eventually he moved into my brother's room and my brother totally loved him and let him fly around his room and sit on his shoulder and eat of his hand but he never learned how to talk, just uttered the two syllables of his name in a garbled bird language, and I was always blamed for that. When he died and was buried in a velvet box at the foot of the yard beneath the lilac bushes that are no longer there, was I even invited to the funeral?

Oops, I seem to have gone off on another tangent. See what I mean? Not concise, not clear, this blog will never have its very own book deal.

My side of the mountain mystery

I don't remember ever reading My Side of the Mountain, and I'm not sure how that is considering it was written by the author of Julie of the Wolves and how awesome is Julie of the Wolves? Pretty darn awesome. And My Side is about a kid who runs away from home and moves into a hole in a tree, where he befriends a falcon and a weasel. Seems like a no-brainer. I'll try to get my 8-year-old to read it with me, but she'll probably be put off by the cover—the kid does look pretty grumpy and unappealing (whither the weasel? the falcon?).

Anyway, I bring this find to everyone's attention not because the book is intrinsically exciting but because of the bonus between the pages—this somewhat freaky sticker, which resembles a Wacky Pack but is not a Wacky Pack. What is it? Got me.

The strippers and the sewing book

Often at an estate sale I find myself mulling over some combo of the usual questions: How could people live like this? Why didn't their family want to keep this deeply personal item? What accounts for this fascination with Hummels? And what, exactly, is that smell...?

Sometimes I'll open up a book and something interesting and unrelated will fall into my lap. Then the question becomes, How did this end up in here...?

Like, how did this strip club table card end up inside this 1961 edition of the classic Better Homes & Gardens Sewing Book?

It's challenging, but fun, to try to fathom a scenario that'll explain it. Here's one version: Back in the early ’60s, a Don Draper-ish husband takes a business trip to L.A., joins some fellow execs for a "meeting" at Al Deitch's Body Shop on the Sunset Strip. Drink their two-drink minimum and then some. Don decides to keep the card on the table as a souvenir, stuffs it in the pocket of his gray flannel suit and promptly forgets about it (so much alcohol—how did they remember anything?). Days, maybe weeks later, the wife is about to take Don's suit to the cleaners but checks his pockets first—it is an unwritten hausfrau law that any cash a husband neglects to remove from his pocket before depositing laundry on floor immediately becomes the property of the hausfrau. But instead of a few loose bills to add to her mad money fund, she finds the fulsome Kim and lovely Lolita. What happens next?

1) She freaks out on husband, brandishing the evidence and later, after she's calmed down, thinks "Hmm. This would make a great bookmark."

2) Husband never left it in his pocket; he brought it home specifically as a souvenir for his very understanding wife who happens to be an amateur artist. He thinks she might find inspiration for her Vargas-and-Walter T. Foster inspired work in the figures of Kim and Lolita. Instead, she uses it as a bookmark.

3) There was never any business trip. Husband and wife were vacationing together in L.A. Decide to trawl the clubs of the Sunset Strip, and perhaps pick up an interested third party. Wife cherishes card, a memento of awesome love vacays she used to take with husband, before they had kids, and the kids grew up, and they grew apart, and she became a prisoner of her capacious craft room. Decides to use it as a bookmark.

Seriously, this could go on for hours, for days, years and would we ever hit on the truth? What was Really Going On in that modest split-level ranch? All theories are welcome.