Marvelous

I scored these mint-conditon 1976 and 1977 Marvel comics calendars at a great sale in a great neighborhood. I remember there were flash-flood warnings that day but I braved the deluge because the sale was in a long, low brick ranch that I'd driven by millions of times—I had to see what treasure was lying behind its midcentury facade! My fortitude was rewarded: One room had nothing but boxes of pulpy paperbacks and comics, humor books of the ’60s and Mad magazines. That was one hour of glorious sifting. Sigh. Anyway, I knew at a glance that Lindsay must've had these calendars when he was a kid—10 or 11 years old and, I understand, an even bigger comic book geek than he is now. Whoever owned these calendar originally was a similar geek—they are perfect, not a mark on them, not a tear. No one crossed out the days or noted birthdays, god forbid. They were only a quarter apiece so naturally I bought them and when I presented them to Lindsay that evening (I couldn't wait till his birthday), he was, as expected, quite verklempt. He floated down memory lane for a spell, stroking the pristine pages, ogling the amazing artwork and eventually put the calendars on the side table at his end of the couch. Which is where they have remained ever since, in the pile of guitar magazines and cooking magazines.

See, that's the conundrum. What do you do with a calendar once the year is over? Recycle it. Or, if you love it, tear it apart and frame the art? And mar the perfect integrity of the calendar? How could you even think of it, right?? He would never countenance that. We could sell these calendars to some other comic book geek for around 50 bucks a pop and let that guy slip it into an archival box or showcase and pull it out for fondling whenever the mood strikes. Right. That's sooo gonna happen.

My partner in shopping

Today marks 23 years (12 of them legal) of bliss with my sometimes better, sometimes worser half. He left this little illustration on my desk a couple years ago—not sure why, he must've been in some kind of trouble, and what better way to make overtures of peace than to dash off an idealized portrait of us looking so jolly at an estate sale? With me brandishing...a head of broccoli? It's a pretty rare occasion that he looks so sunny at a sale, usually because he's wrangling the kids when he's not dramatically sighing about the massive quantities of books I'm buying. Whatever! Left to his own devices, like when I make him hit a sale in the vicinity of his downtown office, he's been known to get waaay carried away with the spending. Other times, he's struck gold, like when he scored a Paul Klee litho in some Kerville barn for $17 and it's supposedly worth thousands. I don't deny his eye—if only he could work on his attitude! But in his honor, this week I will highlight a few of Lindsay's finds/follies, as well as stuff I've bought for him at sales.

Good eggs

It's been too many weeks since I last shared a Walter T. Foster art-instruction manual. This has always been one of my favorites, though I'm not sure why. Maybe I didn't know felt tip pens were an actual medium. How do they differ from Magic Markers? Maybe I just like the Rona Jaffe Best of Everything vibe I'm getting from the illustrations. Maybe I just really like that portrait of breakfast—when I eventually come across another copy of A.V. Almazar's How to Paint with Felt-Tip Pens, and I've no doubt that I will, I'm going to tear out and frame that plate of sunny-side eggs and hang it in my kitchen.

Time for a new timer

I don't know what other people talk about in the privacy of their own homes but in our house we spend an inordinate amount of time talking about kitchen timers. How none of them work. How we need to stop wasting money on timers that don't work. How the ones that do work invariably get lost in the house. How the jangle of most timers is so unpleasant. How Lindsay has a knockout idea to improve timers that one day he will patent and make us as rich as one of those "inventor moms," like the one who came up with the Snack Trap or the one who invented that shopping cart cover-thingie for babies. How I'm skeptical of Lindsay's idea but I'm going to keep it to myself in case one of you totally steals it and makes a success of it and quits your day job and moves to Kaui and I will never hear the end of it. Talking about timers invariably leads to talk about the folly that is our expensive, defective Bluestar range and how we need to replace it. This is never a discussion that ends well.

But what a ball of sunshine this timer is, huh? So radiant, so ’70s, so very, very big! You can't tell from this picture but it's the size of a lunch plate and meant to be mounted on the wall. In other words, the sort of kitchen timer that's very hard to lose should we (Lindsay) ever actually mount it on the wall. It's just been sitting on the counter for the last six months, you know, untouched, waiting for someone to mount it on the wall.

I pried the timer off a wood-paneled backsplash in a standard-issue avocado kitchen at an estate sale. It was grimy with 30 years of kitchen splatter but I've got a strong stomach and willed myself not to think what the results might reveal if I had the thing swabbed and sent to a lab. Until I dropped it—and for a half second all the estate salers milling in the kitchen froze and gawped at the greasy hairball mass that had accumulated inside the timer. Ugh. The moment it split in two, I'd committed to buying the vile thing for $2.50. We break it, we cry; you break it, you buy, blah blah yeah whatever. But as you can see, there's a happy ending: The timer wasn't permanently damaged, and I managed to clean it with half a bottle of Greased Lightning and a roll of paper towels. Was it worth all the effort and the trauma or even $2.50? I'll let you know, if we ever start using it.

Who will speak for the knees?

This is the root of a cypress tree—what's known as a cypress "knee"—and it's something I see occasionally on my estate sale rounds in San Antonio. Cypress trees are native to this area and they figure mightily into the city's second-most-famous tourist attraction, the Riverwalk. The roots poke up out of the earth like stalagmites, or like prehistoric fingers—don't you think this one looks like it's giving us the finger? It would not surprise me to know that trees were collectively flipping the bird at San Antonio, given how they're razed willy-nilly here to make room for big-box shopping centers and condos.

Turns out that cypress knee art was once quite the thing in the Southeastern United States, especially Florida where the rampant kneecapping of cypresses resulted in laws prohibiting the practice (the knee obtains oxygen for the tree—cut it off and the tree is very sad). Some artists would just varnish the wood and let the biomorphic shapes speak for themselves, perhaps topping it with a lampshade. Others were a tad more literal, carving and/or painting the knees to resemble wizards, witches and gnomes (google images for cypress knee art and you'll see what I mean).

At this website, I learned about Tom Gaskins, the preeminent cypress knee artist, who died in 1998. Check out the completely awesome vintage brochures for his Florida roadside attraction Cypress Kneeland, "a 3 in 1 attraction," comprising a cypress knee museum, the world's first cypress knee factory, and a 2,000-foot catwalk in a cypress swamp. The museum featured knees resembling FDR, Stalin and "a lady hippo wearing a Carmen Miranda hat." The brochure makes some pretty grandiose statements, which I've no reason to doubt:

The collection is fantastic, artistic, humorous. One with a well-oiled imagination can see in the knees nearly everything that was and is yet to be. Animals, birds, and people you will recognize, good and bad.

Gaskin's son had taken over the family business after his father died, and in an article in Roadside America, he gave one of the best quotes I've read in a good long while: "This place is real Florida. It's not a plastic mouse show. I'm a Florida Cracker, a piney woods rooter. I know how to survive on acorns. It'll be a long time before anyone ever shuts us down."

Unfortunately, he had to shut the place down in 2000 after someone broke in and stole many of the best knees. Total drag, right? The only places I've been in Florida are the aforementioned "plastic mouse show" and the place in Miami where the big cruise ships depart. I'm bummed that I'll never bear witness to the treasures Gaskin amassed.

Kids find the darnedest things

I don't take my kids to estate sales as much as I used to, much to their relief and mine. I generally hit sales on Friday mornings, when both kids are in school and the merch is usually partially discounted but there's still good stuff left (and no lines to get inside). They don't like coming for the obvious reasons: It's boring! We're bored! You won't buy us anything! Though of course that's not true—I buy them stuff all the time, most of it total crap to appease them while Mommy finishes sorting through all the musty ephemera in the garage. But sometimes they hit on something good, like this nice edition of The Boy's King Arthur, illustrated by N.C. Wyeth and published by Scribner's, which my eight-year-old unearthed from a landslide of forgettable books, mostly mildewed and worm-chewed. The best part was how she gave me that familiar big-eyed, pleading look, the same one she gives me when she wants me to buy her some squalid Happy Meal toy:

Her: Mom, can I PLEASE get this?

Me: Oh, I don't know, sweetie—it's 25¢ and the dustjacket is in tatters... I guess, but you'll have to work extra hard in the salt mines next week!

When I was her age, my family used to do flea markets and antique shows every weekend. As a bribe, a distraction, my parents gave my brother and I a little money so we could shop. I think I spent most of my money on hot chocolate, doughnuts and pony rides (whenever possible), but I also browsed the stalls and made purchases, most of which probably ended up in landfills because as you know, I have everything, and remember everything, so I am sure if I bought it and it was worth keeping, I would still have it? Or at least remember it?

One thing I remember well was a handmade stuffed horse, with a yarn mane, that I obsessed over from the moment we arrived at a flea market held in a public-school gymnasium in Paramus, NJ. Part of the appeal might have been the young woman selling it. She had a whole herd of handmade stuffed horses—and she looked like Bailey from WKRP, but with cat-eye glasses and a Betsy Ross-style outfit. In other words, tres chic circa the mid-’70s. I hung around that booth all day, making small talk and ogling the many styles of patchwork horses—when I wasn't back at our own booth nagging my parents for the astronomical sum of $10. Finally my dad caved at the end of the day—I got the black horse covered with red hearts and I'm sure Bailey was glad to be rid of me. (Between the labor of making the horse and putting up with me all day—was it only worth $10? Inflation, I guess.) Anyway, long story short: The horse graces the bed in my old room in NJ, and my kids play with it whenever we visit. I refuse to bring it back to Texas as they have about 350 stuffed animals between them (no lie—we counted once, and that was a couple years ago).

Another time, at the flea market we did regularly on the grounds of the junior high school in Sparta, NJ, I bought a small, round blue bottle for 10¢ (10¢!). Later, I showed it to my mother who instantly recognized it as a highly collectible Lalique perfume bottle. She cajoled me into giving it to her in exchange for a small polished pale green stone with googly eyes glued onto it that a friend of hers was selling (I got to choose from a whole case of googly-eyed stones). And it should come as no surprise for you to hear that I still have that googly-eyed stone inside my old tackle box. (I'll add a photo next time I'm taking pictures.) Does my mom still have the Lalique bottle? Doubtful, but you never know...

Me and my Shadows

I think I'm losing my touch because somehow it took me a whole week to notice that the official trailer for the latest Tim Burton-Johnny Depp collaboration, Dark Shadows, had been released. What the hell? I didn't even know it was in production! In addition to being a fan of the Burton-Depp oeuvre (though I don't believe they will ever, ever top Ed Wood), I'm a bit of a vampire buff. I came to terms with that previously here. I love True Blood, though a little less with each passing season. Every May, I self-loathingly download the latest slapdash volume in the Sookie Stackouse series (hmm...is that available for pre-order yet?). I look forward to seeing the final grotesque installment in the Twilight movie series at one of those theaters where alcohol is served. And Bram Stoker's Dracula is definitely, probably, I think on my list of the top 20 books of all time (I've never actually made such a list so I'm not 100 percent sure how it would shake out).

But I've never seen Dark Shadows—the Goth soap is a little bit before my time though I'm sure I would've watched with my mom if I hadn't been, like, a baby. (Thanks to her, I was an Edge of Night addict all through middle and high school.) Dark Shadows aired five days a week for around five years, so, you know, it's not like playing catch-up with an entire season of Mad Men or Breaking Bad over a single weekend. I don't think I've consumed TV on that scale since watching the first few seasons of Six Feet Under while pacing the narrow confines of my Brooklyn living room, a squalling newborn in my Over-the-Shoulder-Baby-Holder. Anyway, the Dark Shadows DVDs are not surprisingly of poor quality, production values of 1960s soaps not being quite on HBO levels. I could start reading these Dark Shadows novelizations written by Marilyn Ross (pen name for a Canadian writer by the name of Dan Ross)—apparently there are only 32 of them! I scored a nice stack at the church thrift shop in my hometown (no, my mom did not donate them) but I think it's more likely I'll just wait for the movie. The trailer made me guffaw at least three times—that's gotta be a good sign.