Object lesson: Why I bought these random wooden blobs

What am I?

This is the story of what happens when I find out there's going to be an estate sale in my very favorite midcentury neighborhood. When I pull up to the house on the day of the sale and see that it's not only my favorite 'hood but one of those adorable atomic ranches that hasn't been meddled with by owners who just want to "modernize a little." When I know in my bones that this is going to be a fantastic sale and I am going to make some serious scores. YES.

How quickly ecstatic anticipation turns to disappointment. Maybe all the good stuff has been sold or none of it was really that good in the first place. What's left might be okay but it's the first day of the sale so it's wicked overpriced. I circle the rooms again and again, methodically turning over objects for their marks, rifling through kitchen cupboards, poking through closets one more time, scanning the spines on the bookshelves yet again, till finally I settle on buying two sort-of-interesting lumps of wood because maybe they are some midcentury sculptural objet but more likely they came from somebody's iguana tank.

The hissing sound you hear is one of deflated expectations.

Lesson learned: Don't feel obligated to buy stuff just because in the reality you conjured based on the estate sale ad, the stuff was awesome. The stuff isn't awesome, unless you happen to own a pet shop.

The Uncola

Feelin' old-school 7-up?

Here is a typical story from childhood: My father's secretary—yes, that's what they called them and she also took dictation and chainsmoked while doing so—had a hoarder mother (though that's not what they called them then), who passed away or was moved to a nursing home or both, but in different order, leaving her daughter to deal with the old house chock full of crazy. Naturally, our family would be invited to help out by picking through its wonders (who you gonna call?). I don't remember much about that day, mostly just the exhortations to be careful in certain rooms because "you might fall through the floor," which probably explains why my brother and I spent most of our time outside, in the shady overgrown rock garden, where we found several large rocks for our own garden (including one that looked just like an alligator), and picking through heaps of rubbish amid a few broken-down outbuildings.

In one of these piles my brother unearthed this old 7-up bottle, which we both considered a tremendous score. For a time there, 7-up was cooler than Coke. They had great commercials, and it just seemed more grown-up, like a cocktail. This bottle stood proudly on a bookcase in his bedroom for many years, and I have no idea how it ended up accompanying me to Texas. I wonder if he wants it back? Am guessing not, especially now as he's in the middle of a classic NYC-style move, physically carrying his stuff from the old loft to the new one a few blocks away because it's too hard to find parking for his car in Brooklyn and the Man With the Van is too expensive/unreliable. The sort of lifestyle that would turn even the most unrepentant hoarder into a minimalist.

More things I didn't buy: Toikka birds and Scary Monsters

How happy was I to find a Toikka?

I know it's not right to bitch, but it does bum me out when an estate sale service does a good job executing its fiduciary responsibility to get the best price for its clients. Toikka birds are the work of Oiva Toikka, glass designer extraordinaire for the Finnish design company Iitalla, and they aren't free. They're also as scarce as peacocks in South Texas (actually my neighbor has peacocks so I don't know why I said that—as scarce as kiwi birds?), and I hardly ever find any Finnish design objects...

The original brochure!

...let alone Finnish design objects with the original paperwork! You might be thinking, doesn't she have enough Finnish design objects? But you know the answer to that. Anyway, I passed. Too rich for my blood, especially after I paid money I don't have on such a great score at the same sale! Which I'll share soon.

Bowie forever stamps

I didn't buy these limited-edition David Bowie Scary Monsters stamps, which apparently came from some obscure import 12-inch, because they were $20. That might have been a mistake. I don't know the market for David Bowie stamps; I just know I wasn't sure what I would do with them. Frame them? Bah.

An unnecessary object

If you're ever on the estate sale trail you know indoor barometers were once mighty popular items. Makes me wonder how we've been managing without them. Anyway, I usually see them in a nautical theme, not this supercute German Black Forest cuckoo style, but $20? I don't pay $20 for just anything.

The Servy-Etta Mystique

Ah, the napkin lady, she is a stern mistress, is she not?

I bought this Servy-Etta Napkin Holder at a flea market in Brooklyn many years ago because I thought it was cute and it came with the original box. But in all that time, I have never managed to weave "luncheon-sized napkins" through the slats in her very severe columnar skirt. What a time suck! This is the sort of thing that should remind everyone who in any way idealizes/venerates/reveres the idea of the Midcentury Hausfrau that, despite all the cute dresses and graphics, it was not all that—time and brainpower were frittered away on nonsensical tasks like this one, and is it any wonder that Betty Draper is such a seething head case? Who wouldn't have been? How did our mothers survive it?

As a collector of vintage Betty Crocker cookbooks and cute midcentury whatnots, I sometimes feel compelled to remind myself of this point, and it seems only right to make it on the much-ballyhooed 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique. This napkin lady was a weapon of oppression—just like irons and this thing women feel compelled to do called "folding the laundry." But I'll save my anti-ironing and laundry-folding diatribe for another day. Today it's all about the tyranny of the napkin lady. Who I still think is very cute, even if her skirt isn't as voluminous as it's supposed to be—the sleek silhouette becomes her.

Cruisin'

I bought this souvenir case full of coasters from a cruise ship called the S.S. Homeric several years ago at a rummage sale in NJ. The case and coasters were in such good condition that my fellow vintage hounds were skeptical that they were legit—they figured they must be some Restoration Hardware knockoff. But, no, they're real. The S.S. Homeric—then known as the S.S. Mariposa—was a luxury ocean liner that launched in 1931 and by the 1960s cruised the Caribbean for the Italian shipping company Home Lines. No, this is not something I knew when I bought them; I learned it from this handy website for devotees of cruising, which features a totally great video of a bunch of pasty white folks clad in ’60s resort attire, playing bizarre and somewhat risque games on deck during a Homeric cruise to Barbados.

I took a Royal Caribbean cruise to Barbados (and four other islands) back in the ’90s. Have you ever been on a cruise? Well, I highly recommend it, IF (a) you have the right attitude and (b) someone else is paying. I was able to fulfill both criteria: I was in my late 20s when F-U-N was priority one, and my in-laws foot the bill. My in-laws, who were laboring under the misapprehension that cruises were all classy like in Cary Grant movies and Titanic and Atlantic crossings on the QE2 and probably what the S.S. Homeric was like back in the ’30s and ’40s. Swanky! Exclusive! But, no, cruises are ridiculous, and as it happened, Lindsay and I were totally prepared because David Foster Wallace's hilarious and cruel essay about his cruise experience was published in Harper's only months before we embarked.

The cruise experience is the opposite of classy and you've got to be able to embrace that or you won't survive. So we hot-tubbed with strangers and played shuffleboard and rallied for muster at an ungodly hour and drank too many umbrella drinks and got sea sick and hit the slots and played a colossal game of bingo with 1,000 fellow passengers and saw the Spinners perform "Rubber Band Man" live and went to discos and groveled before a cream cheese mermaid at the midnight buffet while my in-laws stewed and smoldered. The photo of me below, posing joyfully with a pirate who appears to be aiming his gun directly into my lap, is one of several photo souvenirs I've saved from the trip, along with a pair of very hideous complimentary Royal Caribbean glasses, which are always right next to the bag destined for Goodwill though somehow they never quite make it in.

Maybe that's how the person who owned these S.S. Homeric coasters felt. He/she obviously never used them because they are pristine. And I've never used the coasters either; in fact, I'd forgotten all about them until I decided to clean out my sideboard a few weeks ago (the sideboard is full of forgotten stuff like this. Pretty sure that along with housing the holiday china, that's all sideboards are really good for). And I still can't see myself using them, or getting rid of them because they really are cute and they remind me of my own excellent cruising adventure (I mean, all of the scenes depicted on the coasters went down on my cruise too). Plus, the Homeric was scrapped in 1973 after a serious fire—so what remains of the old ship? Perhaps I should just save these and finally take my Royal Caribbean glasses to Goodwill, where they can remain for a decade or so, till some youngster who collects ’90s kitsch snaps them up. May the circle of stuff be unbroken.

The most beautiful ashtray ever

Did everybody catch the piece in yesterday's Daily Mail about the legendary Oregon Wonder Horses, a.k.a. the Real-Life My Little Ponies? Really, you didn't? Well, check it out here. These were 19th-century horses, probably Analusians, that were exhibited in circuses and side shows and horse shows. They had really long manes, like ten feet long, and they are just totally awesome fantasy horses. They're like Pegasus meets My Little Pony meets The Last Unicorn meets those carousel horses in Mary Poppins that come to life. After the most famous of the Wonder Horses, Prince Imperial, died in 1888, his owners had him stuffed and continued to display him at various venues where taxidermied Wonder Horses might draw a crowd. According to the article, he's still on display at some historical society in Ohio. Don't you love learning these random bits of American history from a British newspaper?

Anyway, reading about the Wonder Horses reminded me that I haven't shared this fabulous find: the Most Beautiful Ashtray in the World (in my opinion, you don't have to agree), designed by the great Sasha Brastoff. Close readers of this blog will recall my newfound obsession with the midcentury potter/sculptor/Carmen Miranda impersonator; I wrote about it here. I've been keeping my eye out at the estate sales ever since, resisting the siren song of ebay, where I could easily find the goods to turn my house into a Sasha Brastoff Ashtray Museum. But I won't, cuz as you know, it's all about the hunting and the finding and the keeping. The challenge to owning the most beautiful ashtray in the world in a nonsmoking household is trying to keep it free of loose change, collar stays, paper clips and small stones collected by small children. This is not a receptacle, people! It is a work of art. Behold.

Owl be seeing you

I mentioned that I went to an off-the-hook estate sale a couple weeks ago—a total shrine to one woman's owl obsession. I'm disappointed that I didn't take more pictures; I was a little overwhelmed. For starters, I had the whole fam with me. They are very distracting. And when we arrived there was a crime unit truck parked out front and police tape across the door—it seems the home had been robbed the night before. That also threw me off my game. What owl treasure did the burglars make off with? The only thing I know they took was a special kind of collapsible wastebasket that the estate sale staff had brought with them. They were very broken up about it. Apparently, these collapsible wastebaskets are very handy.

So, right. This place: stuffed with owls, including stuffed owls, one of which my five-year-old made me buy for her, despite my rule against buying used stuffed animals. Most of my estate-sale rules crumble if that buys me a little more time to buy stuff.

The place was small, and sad, and stuck in time. This is what the wallpaper looked like:

I bought a bunch of craft materials and vintage books and ephemera that had nothing to do with owls. The only owl paraphernalia I purchased, apart from the aforementioned stuffed owl, was a very excellent owl planter. Somehow, I was not tempted by the walls decked with owl decoupaged plaques, nor by the owl-covered tables crammed into every room.

I also did not consider this deeply dusty and ancient owl pinata even for a minute. I'm pretty sure this guy is the Wise potato chip owl, right?

But I did buy a sack full of these little feathered owls, the kind with wires affixed to their feet so you can place them on wreaths or odd pieces of driftwood for owl-centric centerpieces. That could happen. As of now they're still in the bag.

I'm off to the hurricane-lashed homeland tomorrow, for a week of holiday carousing and possibly thrifting capped by the kids' first time seeing the Rockettes. Should be awesome. Dispatches may be sporadic, or nonexistent, but you can always find me on instagram and now etsy.

Finnish Fridays: Shroomin'

Finland is the land of trolls and toadstools. So here are some cute little wooden toadstool candlesticks for your viewing pleasure. In truth, these toadstools were made in Sweden (the little blue labels underneath clearly state this fact), which probably makes this the perfect opportunity to explore the centuries-long fractious love-hate relationship between Finland and Sweden, but I don't have time to wade into those frigid waters right now. Right now, I need to get in my car and drive a few miles to an ugly neighborhood with a promising-sounding estate sale before it's time to meet the kids at the bus stop. If I see anything interesting, I'll share on instagram. Happy Friday!

Finnish Fridays: I am Aires, Hear Me Bleat

Warning: If you're a very naive believer in the zodiac, don't read the next paragraph.

I used to write horoscopes for magazines despite having received no astrological training. I mean, I guess it's not entirely accurate to say that I wrote them. It might be slightly more accurate to say that I jazzed up/embellished/fleshed out the predictions written by a bona fide astrologist. But still. I kinda wrote them. I.e., made them up.

Like most things that require a suspension of disbelief, astrology is something I disbelieve in. Maybe in part because I'm an Aires (a "true" Aires, mind you, not one of those "on the cusp" Aires) and my personality traits seem to bear little resemblance to the Aires dossier. Astrology buffs have been known to spit-take when they learn that I'm a fire sign, let alone an Aires, purported to be the fieriest of all fire signs. Sometimes this is insulting.

So how does a skeptic end up with so many zodiac tchotchkes? When your Finnish relatives give them to you, of course. And I'm not complaining—this guy is supercute.

I think that I shall never see / a poem as lovely as a key

I collected a lot of things when I was a little kid (bottle caps, matchbooks, plastic horses) but none with the single-minded intensity as I did keys. I don't have any origin story for this obsession; I can't explain my passion for keys. I don't think I've actively pursued keys since I was maybe 11 or 12, but I am happy that I still have this collection. My five-year-old is nuts for it—especially the concept of the skeleton key—so while we were in NJ, we started The Key Project, in which we trace every key in the collection and admire each shape. If I were a different person, I'd just keep her tracings in some adorable book or binder and sell off the keys, but I can't do that. Quelle horreur. Instead, we await some sign that my parents have figured out the cheapest possible way to ship several pounds of keys.

Finnish Fridays: Tango til they're sore

Today on Finnish Fridays we're featuring a pair of dancing Finns carved from wood, which my mother gave me, I don't remember when. Underneath someone has written in neat ballpoint print "Souvenir from Finland, 1953." This tchotchke has never really pleased my eye but the kids love it for some reason, and have managed to incorporate it into the ongoing Verdopolis-like sagas they weave with Playmobil, Littlest Pet Shop, Polly Pocket and Papo figures.

It does remind me of this Morley Safer segment that aired on 60 Minutes in the early ’90s about the alleged passion the Finns have for the tango. I say "alleged" because overall the tone of the piece is quite patronizing and it makes it seem like you can hardly make your way through a public space in Finland without running smack into a flash mob of mopey Finns sadly tangoing. Ptooey. I never heard anything about this Finnish love affair with the tango till I saw it on 60 Minutes.

Finnish Fridays: And this little piggy went weeweewee

I've never associated pigs with Finland—except in the form of sauna sausage (mmm...sauna sausage)—so I'm not sure how we're ending up with a porcine theme here on Finnish Fridays, but let's go with it.

This little piggy was some sort of giveaway from the bank Postipannki, and it's so wee it couldn't hold more than a dollar or so in pennies—not sure what its capacity would've been for Finn markka, or Euro for that matter. You can't open this bank because apparently only the bank staff had the key. I guess this was fun for kids? Seems like you'd be making a lot of trips to the bank. Anyway, according to wikepdia, Postipannki closed/merged in 1997 so this pig serves no purpose, except as a repository for money you don't plan to use. But it is pleasant to look at, don't you agree?

Finnish Fridays: Picky, picky

Is the world divided between pickers and flossers? If so, I fall in the latter camp, though if I were a picker, I doubt I'd use toothpicks like these, since they're about the size of tongue depressors. Probably some indication here of the state of Northern European dentistry, circa the 1970s, when I think my parents received this as a gift. For decades it remained in some box, original packaging still intact, till it mysteriously arrived on my doorstep, and what am I supposed to do with it? Too cute to get rid of, like most Finnish things, even porcine toothpick holders. The word "kaivinkone" is stamped on the side, which seems to translate as a digger or excavating vehicle. I guess that's a play on the toothpick's purpose? Grody.

One cool thing: The company that made this item, Nikkarien Oy, is still in business. They seem to specialize in cute home goods, mostly sauna paraphernalia, which I love gawking at even though a sauna would be the wrongest thing to have in South Texas. Sauna hats and sauna guestbooks—it's a whole 'nother world of things to buy.

I tawt I taw a Limoges butterpat

Brooklyn is famous for its stoop sales, though I'm not sure why. I lived and loved in Brooklyn for about ten years and the only thing I ever bought at a Brooklyn stoop sale was a set of Limoges butter pat dishes with weird babies painted on them. Here are two from the set. I'm not a baby person—I was fond of my own babies but Anne Geddes calendars you will not find in my home—yet I like these babies, particularly the one under the umbrella. I get the impression that the artist was planning to paint frogs but at the last minute changed his mind and went with babies.

I also love the concept of the butter pat dish. It's right up there with the personal ashtray. I've got quite a few of those but will I ever have cause to use them again? I may have given up Camel Lights but you'll have to pry my butter from my cold dead hands. And someday I'll have a fancy dinner party and all my guests will have a place to put their pats (and hang their hats).

(A final thought on butterpat: It's a good name for a dog, a pony, a cat, or a bunny. I keep meaning to create a file of future pet names because you know you're going to need them at some point and when that moment arrives you can't remember all the awesome names you've come up with over the years and you end up letting the kids name the pet for a movie character or the color of its fur.)

Finnish Fridays: Some bunny loves you!

When people learn that I'm 51% Finnish, they often ask if I speak the language. It's a crazy question. Who speaks Finnish, apart from the five million or so multilingual Finns? Finnish is one of the hardest, most obscure languages you can learn; it's in the Fenno-Ugric group and thus counts Estonian, Hungarian and a handful of minor languages spoken in Russia as its nearest cousins. Don't think, however, that the idea of learning Finnish never crossed my mind; I attended one of the few (I'm assuming) universities that offer Finnish and I'm sure I dog-eared that page in the course catalog. But, you know, it was just a whole bunch of credits and a whole bunch of work and most inconveniently held what seemed like all day on FRIDAY, when I purposely confined my classes to Monday through Thursday, so to my everlasting shame as a 51% Finn, I stuck with Latin, a language spoken by even fewer people.

But! I know a couple of important words. Kiitos is thank you. Hei is Hi. Spider is hamahakki (mentally put umlauts over all those a's because I don't know how). And bunny, as in this adorable fellow that I bought at a flea market in Helsinki: pupujussi.

Finnish Fridays: Mmm...pie.

What—this doesn't look delicious to you? Then you must not be Finnish (or even 51% Finnish) because this, my friends, is a Karelian Rice Pie (a.k.a., Rice Pasty) and there ain't nothing finer smeared with a little egg butter (that would be hard-boiled egg smushed up with butter—YUM). And here you thought Finnish cuisine was all vodka and blackest licorice!

I used to get a fairly steady, or at least semiannual, supply of Karelian Rice Pies from my parents, whenever they hit the Scandinavian Festival circuit. But at some point several years ago, the ScanFest stopped coming to town, and I moved away, so in lieu of delectable hearty rice pies, all I have now is this sculpture of a rice pie. Not quite the same. There are myriad rice pie recipes on the internets, but, I dunno, it seems kinda hard.

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?

I spy, with my little eye...

Memories II, 1976

When my five-year-old saw these images on my computer, she flew at the screen like a magpie, squawking "What is that?! What is that, Mommy?" I think part of the attraction is that Marie Cosindas's tableaux are kinda reminiscent of Walter Wick's I Spy books. That's a terrible thing to say about fine art, right? The other reason is that artful(ish) piles of clutter are a specialty in these parts, and my daughter is an extra-special fan (no one loves sorting the old tackle box more). There was a brief moment when I actually thought about drawing from our own abundant tchotchke resources and shooting my own I Spy photographs and then turning them into books on Shutterfly and then I thought if I really had time to do that sort of project hadn't I ought to start looking for a paying job?

According to Tom Wolfe's introductory essay to Marie Cosindas: Color Photographs, Cosindas was also something of a young magpie:

Rich, congested, and yet delicate and orderly arrangements were the sort Maria Cosindas delighted in. It was a look that resonated with memories of her childhood. In the apartment that she and her nine brothers and sisters grew up in, there was a corner with a little built-in cupboard that became her private preserve. She used to spend entire afternoons arranging every toy, knickknack, doll, and souvenir she possessed upon the shelves. The motif turns up in both of her pictures called Memories.

How great is that? Of course she had her own Cabinet of Curiosities, a la Pippi Longstocking. No wonder I love these photos, even though they are all creepy and Havishamy and I can feel the dust gathering in my nostrils just looking at them. It's a familiar feeling.

Christmas Tree, 1967

Christmas Still Life, 1970

Roses, Mexico, 1966

Masks, 1966

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.

Sand dollar general

I see a lot of shells at estate sales, and very often they're in the bathroom. Once upon a time, it was de rigueur to accessorize one's powder room with sea shells, usually by placing a bowl or basket of them on the counter, right next to the sink. I don't get that at all—I've got a pretty expansive bathroom countertop; nevertheless it's so crowded with mostly ineffective products and machinery that I wouldn't dream of trying to shoehorn some shells (or any tchotchkes) into the mix, unless my dermatologist told me that rubbing one's face with conchs is as good as Botox, but without all that Botox baggage.

A lot of those bathroom shells seem to be the kind you buy prepackaged at a craft store or maybe a seaside tourist shop, not the kind that you dedicate a lifetime of vacations to collecting. Those kind of shells usually occupy a place of honor in the home—on the mantel, or in a basket on the coffee table. This particular basket of sand dollars, which my kids forced me to buy, is the latter type. I didn't want to buy them; for one thing, baskets bum me out. Judging by estate sale evidence, suburbanites have waaay too many of them. They're pernicious. They fill closets and garages. Cheap, sad baskets, the kind you buy at Michael's or Hobby Lobby, not the kind that could be exhibited at museums of Native American art (those kind of baskets, I do like). My crankiness about baskets is feeling a little fresh as I've just packed up Easter and shoved it into a closet that once seemed spacious. We've somehow managed to accumulate more Easter baskets this year. I have two kids with at least a dozen baskets between them. This is how it begins.

My other issue with buying this basket of sand dollars is that there's something not right about buying an instant collection, when you consider the years of effort, of sharp-eyed beachcombing, it took to gather these perfect sand dollars. The quest, and the memories of the quest, is what shelling—and any kind of collecting—is about. I grew up vacationing on the Jersey shore, which is great for shelling but, as with any beach, there's a limited variety of shells you can find—it was mostly scallops, clams, oysters, mussels, jingle shells, and on a good day, moon snails and whelks. When I was a little kid, I was always searching for a conch or coral or a sand dollar, treasures that never washed up on our stretch of the Jersey shore (though we did find horseshoe crabs, dead sharks, and one terrible summer, medical waste and alleged animal sacrifices from Santeria rituals). I didn't find an actual sand dollar on a beach until I was in my early 30s and visiting friends in lovely Lynn, Massachusetts. I still have those sand dollars, in a cut-glass candy dish that belonged to Lindsay's grandmother, on a shelf in my office, alongside the exotic shells I found in Kaui on my honeymoon, volcanic rocks from Iceland and the Clovis artifacts discovered in my own backyard. Are they destined to be sold at my estate sale (many many many decades from now)?

Despite all my misgivings, I didn't think twice about shelling out a couple of bucks for somebody else's shell collection. 'Twas a small price to pay to extend my stay at a really good estate sale. Plus, the kids have come up with all sorts of games involving the sand dollars. They even dyed a few of them along with their Easter eggs—and they're now stowed in the once-spacious closet, along with their inflatable rabbits, singing rabbits, vintage rabbits and one dozen Easter baskets.