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.)

Cute as a button jar

My mom had a button jar. I remember being mesmerized by it as a child. Did she buy it or did she create it herself? Not sure, but I'm going to wager she got it at a garage sale, because I don't really remember her doing a whole lot of sewing (she may feel free to dispute this—if she knows how to make a comment on a blog...). I bought this button jar at a garage sale because I knew my kids would dig it, and they did. I also knew they would want to open it and dump out the contents, and they did want to, but I wouldn't let them. Is that so wrong? I think spilling the contents kinda spoils the beauty of the button jar, which is holding it in your hands and turning it around and around, not knowing how many buttons are in there and what other treasure might lie within, and seeing something different every time you look.

Of course that also means the button jar serves no practical purpose—i.e., as a repository of stray buttons that could be reused—but would it surprise you to know that I don't care? A button jar is a reliquary of sorts, evidence of a life lived. Sifting through the buttons amassed over years, you bear witness to fashion changing, size and circumstances changing, a family growing and contracting. Unless it's one of those faux button jars you see at the antique malls, where a dealer's dumped an assortment of buttons into any old mason jar and slapped a $25 price tag on it. Don't ask me why those inauthentic button jars offend me, but they do. Don't ask me how a person comes to have so many things to say about button jars because until this moment I didn't know I had it in me. I also realize this all flies in the face of my usual stance against purchasing someone else's collection outright instead of doing the hard, crazy-making work of collecting yourself (see sand dollars). I try to be consistent, but often I fail.

Back to button jars. There's something to be said for the practical applications of the button jar, and I'm not sure why I haven't started my own. All my new clothes seem to come with a little envelope containing a spare button or two, and I just throw those little envelopes in different random drawers and thus have never had a proper replacement button at the ready when I've needed one.

Officially on my to-do list: Start a button jar that can be sold at my future estate sale.

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.

Patches

Like many children of the ’70s who enjoyed the richly varied curriculum of a public middle school, come 7th grade my elective choices were two: Home Economics or Shop. I don't think anyone dared to cross the gender divide, myself included, so I never got the chance to make a cheese board in the shape of a mouse. Instead I got to make English muffin pizzas under the tutelage of a woman whose black beehive 'do topped the black polyester vest-and-pants ensembles she made herself. She also taught me how to sew on an actual sewing machine. I made a wraparound skirt with a red floral print, and a navy blue polo shirt with a white collar that I thought was pretty freaking stylish.

Despite that promising beginning—they were both dimly recognizable as clothing—I never touched a sewing machine again. But I can reasonably manage the basics of hand-stitching—you know, sewing a button that's destined to fall off; mending a small hole in a seam that will reopen soon after. So it's possible—possible—that I might one day sew the patches I invariably pick up at thrift stores and estate sales onto my clothes or my kids' clothes. If my kids would let me. Both of them have an aversion to denim (too hot!) or "dungarees" as I still like to call them, so it's more likely I could sew the patches onto the old blanket-lined denim jacket that I've held on to since childhood and have previously celebrated in print here. I rarely wear it on account of it not being terribly flattering (some things just don't hang the same as they did back when I was 13) but maybe a few more patches would do the trick. (Here is my exact jacket; apparently it is "rare.") This jacket belonged to my brother before me, and he covered it with his own patches (I distinctly remember one in the shape of a leaf that said "Leaf me alone"). The jacket was came to him via the five brothers of the Taylor family who lived across the street. Each wearer embellished the jacket to his own taste, and ripped off the patches before handing it down.

When I got the jacket, I sewed a Rolling Stones tongue on the back and covered the rest of it with my button collection. Which makes me wonder what the hell happened to my button collection?