What the kids scored: Polly Pocket, the Book of Lists, rainbow suspenders and so many cats

This is the face of my younger daughter when she learns that she has to accompany me on a thrifting expedition, but it's definitely not how she looks when she makes a great score—like those rainbow suspenders she's wearing, which are straight out of the Mork & Mindy era (I took this picture at art camp; her face is a reflection of the searing San Antonio summer temperature, not of her feelings about Robin Williams). She Morked out for a good two weeks after finding these suspenders at my favorite church-basement thrift shop in NJ; she even watched a few episodes on You Tube and mastered all the Ork lingo. Now I'm on the lookout for one of those puffy down vests.

I had to bring both of my recalcitrant daughters to a sale on a fancy old-school street around the corner from our house—thank god they had two vintage Bluebird Polly Pockets playsets of equal merit, perfect bribe fodder. One kid got the house set and the other got the vet's office. I'm too old to appreciate Polly Pocket, but these are cute, and sort of strange, and apparently collectible.

I am most definitely not too old to appreciate The Book of Lists, published in 1977, with which I bribed my elder daughter at a recent estate sale. She was absorbed by it for days. We'll see if she keeps returning to it the way I used to: I remember checking this book out at my local library so. many. times. My favorite list? "14 Preserved Anatomical Parts of Renowned People," because it notoriously features Napoleon's one-inch penis, alleged to have resembled a seahorse. Now I can't pick the book up without being sucked in by "Shoe Sizes of 20 Famous Men," "16 people Who Have Taken Opium," "10 Famous Librarians" and "9 Nations That Can Blow Us Up in 7-10 Years," including, improbably, Finland, Romania and Yugoslavia, but also Iran and Pakistan. Everyone should have a copy of this book in their bathroom, along with The Andy Warhol Diaries (but that's a post for another day).

My kids, particularly the younger one, are cray-cray-loco for cats. Ours died a year and a half ago, and while his robotic litter box and cat fountain remain in the garage, still I am unable to commit to a new cat. So I've been filling the void with cat books ever since. At this sale, my daughter scored not one but three excellent cat books. We just finished reading Socks. I have already celebrated Beverly Cleary on this blog, but I didn't realize that her remarkable powers of empathy somehow extended to the feline species as well. How does she do it? That woman is a national treasure. Reading Socks nudged me that much closer to admitting a new Socks into our lives. Don't tell my kids I said that.

Man's best friend: his psychedelic cat

Cat beats waif.

So I told you about how I accidentally gave this collectible Igor Pantuhoff waif painting to my younger daughter, who glommed on to it when she was around three years old. In the three years that have elapsed since she insisted it be hung on her wall, I've noticed that there's a decent market for these slightly sullen ’60s chicks and I've been plotting to get it back. But what could possibly be captivating enough to make her give up "wedding girl," as she's apparently been named, because she "looks like a pretty flower girl at a wedding"?

Waif for sale...

It turns out cats trump waifs; kittens defeat sex kittens. (In a perfect world they do, anyway.) I bought this trippy Cheshire cat–style needlepoint at the same sale where I scored the great Babe Rainbow, unsure if I would keep it or sell it. When I'm not sure about something, I tend to foolishly leave it on the dining room table where my magpie can find it and commence nagging me. It's no surprise she would covet this "Man's Best Friend" picture; she's already got a nice collection of vintage needlepoints going on and she's a cat person to the core. She's still not over the death of our sainted kitty Ace, who died well over a year ago. (And truth be told, neither am I—I still regard most cats as Not Ace, which isn't a healthy place to begin an adoption process. Just ask my dog Cupcake, a.k.a. Not Lola.) The kid recently penned an(other) autobiography, which started out the usual way (name, age, hair and eye color) but then immediately segued into "I have two dogs, two birds, five fish and one dead cat." Aww jeez, right?

Well, the pet head count remains unchanged but at least she's got that awesome psychedelic cat on her wall now, hanging where Igor's waif used to be. She did drive a hard bargain though: To sweeten the deal, I had to throw in another vintage needlepoint depicting the Tree of Life. Meanwhile, the "wedding girl" is back languishing in my closet (not on the dining room table!), awaiting her fate.

What the children got: Garfield, candles, fuzzy bear pins

Feed me

In lieu of posting More things I didn't buy this week, I'm bringing you another installment of What the children got. Another way of putting it might be: "More things I wouldn't have bought had I not had my children with me."

Exhibit A: Garfield. I've nothing against the crusty curmudgeon cat; in fact, I was a huge fan myself back in the day. For much of my youth, the first thing I saw in the morning upon awakening was the classic "Have a Nice Day" poster with a typically misanthropic Garfield twist (he's chomping the yellow smiley face). And, I mean, if I saw that poster at a sale and it wasn't all moldy or torn, I'd snap it up. Actually, I'm feeling an itch in my fingers right now to start a new tab and commence googling said poster. My daughters would love it!

But, no! I won't. Garfield is one of those quasi-collectibles that is just ubiquitous. Like Beanie Babies. If I were to start supporting their Garfield habit, we would be overrun. But my main issue with having been bribed into purchasing this Garfield in exchange for (grudging) cooperation at an estate sale is that I've got an oft-broken rule against buying stuffies. They're just gross. Even the spanking-clean, like-new-with-tags never-been-played with variety you see artfully arranged on some sad old person's bed. I ran this guy through the dryer, pointlessly. The dryer doesn't kill bedbugs—it doesn't even kill lice!

A girl's candle is her castle

The younger daughter insisted on my buying this castle candle. I'm a hater of stinky candles, but this is the sort of candle she'll never want to burn because then the beautiful castle would melt. In other words, it's the kind of candle I can get behind.

Shroomin'

The elder daughter made me buy this groovy mushroom candle, which I like even better because (a) it's smaller and (b) it's a mushroom. She's been raised thrifting, so I suppose it's inevitable that she'd acquire a taste for au courant toadstools (and owls).

Anybody wanna buy a pin?

Confession: No one made me buy this fuzzy bear pin display. My kids weren't even with me when I spied this atrocity! I thought Instagramming it would quell my desire to pay $1 for it—sometimes that really works. Since I signed up last year, Instagram has saved me a ton of money. But in this case, it wasn't enough. I knew my kids would love to hawk fuzzy bear pins in one of their faux stores. And now I'm stuck with it.

How do I get my Igor Pantuhoff waif painting back?

Now that I have officially brought home two paychecks from my antiques mall booth and have begun filling my long-dormant Paypal account with proceeds from the etsy shoppe, I've started looking around my house with a new eye. It's not an eye that says, "Wow, lookin' good!" or even "Where the hell's my dust rag?" It's more like, "Hmmm... I wonder how much I could get for that at the booth, or would it be more likely to sell online and how much did I pay for it anyway...?" Now whenever the kids see me pricing a pile of books, they start shrieking until I prove to them that they're all doubles! Promise! And Lindsay feels like I've been singling out only his possessions for possible resale—and he may be right. I mean, if you've left something in the garage for eight years, doesn't that mean you've forsaken ownership?

This Igor Pantuhoff waif painting is another story. I bought her at an estate sale for $5 several years ago. I still remember the time capsule girly-pink bedroom I liberated it from: When I took the picture down, an outline remained on the yellowed walls, a ghost rectangle marking where it had hung for god knows how long. It's not really my style so I stuffed it into a closet, where the younger daughter managed to find it when she was around three years old. She took a shine to it and I didn't see the harm—at least it's not one of Igor's very creepy topless sad-eyed waifs—but now three years later, she's kinda attached to it and I so want to sell it because there's a real market for this stuff! But alas, I know she's not going to give it up, unless I take a leaf out of my own mother's playbook and trade her for it, preferably for something far less valuable (feel free to revisit the story of how my mother hoodwinked me into giving up a collectible Lalique bottle for a rock with glued-on googly eyes). But when I've already given her—I was thinking loaned at the time but it seems more permanent now—half my Breyer horse collection and my vintaqe horsey paint-by-numbers, what does a mother have left to give?

What the children got: the ongoing saga

In honor of my younger magpie's sixth birthday today, I bring you the latest accounting of their estate sale scores. The Native American outfit, above, is completely awesome. The tomahawk is not lethal, but she can now add "archery" to the skills section of her resume.

The older child insisted that I buy this copy of Trudy Phillips, New Girl. I applaud its darling cover, but I'm reasonably certain she's never going to read it.

This box of beads and sequins was a straight-up bribe, purchased to buy me a little more time at the infamous Owl Estate Sale. No one has touched the beads since I bought them—though they HAD to have them at the time—but I expect one day they'll meet their fate in a vacuum-cleaner bag.

I must confess that I was the one who bought this Lite Brite, without any nudging or nagging from any small child. I wanted it! I've wanted it for, like, 35 years. That commercial was irresistible. I don't know why my parents never gave it to me, but I rectified that wrong when I found this Lite Brite in the back of someone's closet. The box is beat to hell, but the lites are still brite. Don't we all just want our children to have what we didn't have? Happy birthday, kid.

Scrabbled

I think I've sounded this theme often, but I'll reiterate in case you've not been taking notes: I don't like games. Board games are boring. I would always rather read. I might even prefer organizing Lindsay's recipes into clear plastic binders, or cleaning the birdcage. Anything else.

But if I must play a game, I always choose Scrabble. Not this Facebook phone stuff that Alec Baldwin seems to enjoy so much; I'm as baffled by that when I see it cluttering my FB feed as I am by those games about jewelry and farm animals. Don't try to tell me how great it is, how addictive if you're a wordsmithy-type person—cuz I'd be too busy reading novels on my phone.

The last adult I played Scrabble with was Lindsay. We were rusticating in Tobago, in a very austere cottage with lots of interesting insects and not a lot of intact mosquito netting. There was no nightlife to speak of; or at least not where a couple of Americans would feel welcome some six months after 9/11. We dined on the same fish special at the only restaurant in town every night. The service was grudging, if not hostile. When we revealed ourselves to be New Yorkers, we were grilled on our 9/11 experiences and informed that the whole thing was an American conspiracy, if it had even happened it all, which we assured everyone it did, since we were eyewitnesses, but they weren't impressed. (Later we'd learn that Hugo Chavez had found refuge in Tobago after a brief coup at the same time we were there. Like I said, Americans weren't too popular then—I wonder if anything's changed.)

Given the circumstances, then, what choice did we have but to hang out in our cabin each evening, with a couple of genial stray dogs for company, drink gin and tonics and play game after game of Scrabble while tropical rain pelted the rooftop? A lovely Scrabble memory, except that maybe Lindsay vowed never to play with me again because I was "too cutthroat" and a "sore loser." Or something like that.

So I didn't play until my kids got old enough to string some letters together and call it a word, and then to string some words together and call it a sentence. Have you ever seen the Scrabble Sentence Game for Juniors? Well, like most games made in 1973, it's pretty awesome (and there's plenty available on eBay for around 10 bucks). Like Scrabble for Juniors, the board has an easy side and an advanced side: The easy side just requires simple matching (good for learning sight words) and the hard side encourages the drolleries of fledgling Becketts, as you can craft all manner of absurd one-liners. If there's a scrabbulous or words-for-friends-like app for that, I might actually consider getting it for my kids.

Petrified

You know, there's more than one Petrified Forest in this great country of ours—possibly a whole bunch, but I'm only aware of two and I've been to one of them. This sack of what looks like poop comes from the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona via an estate sale in San Antonio, where it was purchased to appease a pair of shrill children. That's the more famous Petrified Forest, which is also the setting for the claustrophobic hostage noir of the same name, starring a lovely Bette D., a scary Humphrey Bogart and a milquetoasty Leslie Howard, who never did a damn thing for me (and that's coming from a major anglophile).



I went to the less famous Petrified Forest, in Calistoga, California, on the same wedding trip ten years ago that I mentioned yesterday. (I also went to the less famous geyser named Old Faithful while there.) Funny how a whole passel of memories can be wrapped up in an object. I can't look at the alligator plate or this sack of petrified wood without thinking back on that most excellent moment in time: We were two years married, housed in our first house, gainfully employed, well-dressed and poised on the precipice—within the year, I'd be pregnant and things would change in ways both expected and unexpected. As for the wedding, the happy couple didn't stay married; other wedding guests, who were together but not married, are no longer together. Still others, single and on the prowl, are married with children. Jobs have changed, relationships changed but I think I'm still friends with everybody (at least on Facebook!). Sometimes it takes a sack of millennia-old wood to be reminded that everything is moving, changing, even when time often feels like it's at a standstill.

Gag me

On Fridays, my preschooler has an alphabetically themed show-n-tell. This week's letter was "B," and she selected—okay, with a little prompting from her devious mother who likes to get her laffs where she can get them—this seemingly innocent Box of Balm-Olive After Shave. Little did her unsuspecting classmates nor the teacher nor the assistant teacher know, but when you slide open the box expecting to find a fresh bottle of after-shave... SQUEAL! A rat flies in your face.

Out of all the marvelous objects I've purchased for my lovely children at estate sales, I'm pretty sure this novelty toy is their favorite. And is it any wonder? I still fondly recall the snake in a can I got my brother for his birthday many moons ago. Pretty sure it was the best present I ever got him. The appeal is more subtle than, say, that of a whoopee cushion or fake puke, but equally effective. It may be old (1950s? 60s?) but it never gets old. As I was reminded when I picked my daughter up from school and she and her BFF re-enacted the show-n-tell for my benefit about 19 times. Apparently the best part was when the teachers, having sufficiently recovered from the shock of a rat flying in their faces, took the box down to the office and tried it out on the principal. Totally fell for it.