The awesomest record collection I ever did score

So I have my kids to thank for this adorable vinyl LP case, believe it or not. When I saw the $75 price tag, I didn't even want to haggle with the amateur estate saler who'd dreamed up that exorbitant figure. I never pay that much for anything except furniture, and how far down was she going to come if we were starting at $75? All the way to $25 it turned out, after the kids begged me to buy it, and it also turned out the case had been undervalued from the get-go because it contained a veritable time capsule of late ’70s/early ’80s kid music, almost all with nary a scratch or warp. If I were to sell off these records individually I would definitely recoup my investment and then some. But what kind of heel would break up such a fabulous collection, so lovingly curated by some kid who easily could've been me? Perish the thought.

Herewith, a complete list of the contents (I was too lazy to photograph them all):

Christmas in the Stars: The Star Wars Christmas Album (1980)
Richard Scarry's What do people do all day? read by Carol Channing
Pac-Man Christmas Album (1982)
The Dukes of Hazzard (1981)
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and other Christmas Favorites (1974)
Sesame Disco! (1979)
Walt Disney's Peter Pan and Alice and Wonderland
Raggedy Ann & Andy: A musical adventure: The original motion picture soundtrack (1977)
Disney's Christmas Favorites
Chipmunk Rock (1982)
John Denver & The Muppets: A Christmas Together (1979)
Annie: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1982)
Cargo, Men at Work (1982)
Sesame Street: Help your child learn about numbers! (1977)
C is for Cookie (1974)
Sesame Street 1: Original Cast Record (1974)
Sesame Street 2: Original Cast Record (1977)
Walt Disney's Treasury of Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes
Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, The Caroleer Singers and Orchestra
The Muppet Movie: Original Soundtrack Recording (1979)
Christmas Songs that tickle your funny bone, The Golden Orchestra and singers (1972)
The Chipmunk Song sung by The Grasshoppers
Rocky's Book of Sportsmanship
ET Speaks, official Fan Club record (1982)
Walt Disney's Story of Bambi

The holy trinity of Modern Library books

Let's just have a little Modern Library moment here, shall we? I mean, it's been a while. These are, in my humble opinion, three of the best books ever written: Wuthering Heights, The Portrait of a Lady and The Old Wives' Tale. The last one, by Arnold Bennett, isn't nearly as well known as the other two. I mean, I'm a total English lit major dork and I'd never heard of it until I bought this copy at a library sale, simply because I'm striving toward a complete Modern Library collection. Turned out it wasn't just a lovely edition to look at (despite the slightly tattered dustjacket) but an amazing book to, you know, actually read. A naturalist novel, about the remarkable/unremarkable lives of a pair of sisters, spanning the mid-19th to early 20th centuries. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll mostly cry—just read it, okay?

(Un)happy Wednesday!

She looks like Wednesday from The Addams Family, right?

I bought this sterling example of Outsider Art—okay, we'll just call it amateur art unless I decide to sell it on ebay—at a revelatory sale tucked into a stuck-in-time enclave within one of my favorite midcentury hoods. I had no idea that a nondescript street off of a busy road would suddenly turn to dirt and wind up a vegetation-choked hill, with just a scattering of 1920s-era ramshackle houses, one of which even had the remains of a show-jumping ring in the front yard. Paradise! I love finding off-the-grid places like this still exist amid the strip malls, fast-food joints and KB Homes.

Not that I'm saying I'd want to live in this house, even though I dug its Chas Addams flavah, right down to the spectacular aviary—referred to as the "monkey cage"—in the middle of its multi-acre yard. Yikes—it was a total disaster. It didn't seem like the estate-sale company (a perfectly reputable one) even bothered trying to clean it up: it was jammed to the rafters and everything was coated with layers of dust/dirt/grime. Not for the squeamish estate saler. One of the former residents of the home was clearly a teacher (my favorite!) so I got piles of books and vintage teaching materials. (The cashier asked me the usual question: "Are you a teacher?" To which I gave my usual answer: "No, I'm just crazy.") On my way out, I found this painting teetering on a pile atop the piano. She's a cross between Wednesday and a Keene painting, though this is not a Keene painting—it's signed Robertson and dated 1963. Thinking I might sell it at my nonexistent antiques mall stall or etsy shoppe, I put it in the garage but then brought it out for Halloween display. Six months later, she still graces the picture rail in the dining room. Funny thing about those picture rails—the idea is that they give you the chance to rotate your art without putting holes in the wall. But I just end up finding new ways to squeeze another picture onto the rail without taking anything away. I'm certain that's a metaphor for something.

Roz Chast rules

It's a pretty rare Sunday when I notice the Parade magazine in my local paper—engulfed as it is by Target ads, Toys R Us ads, Kohl's ads, the truncated Star magazine, the funnies—let alone read it. But, obviously, this Roz Chast cover spoke to me. The excerpt from Anna Quindlen's latest book of essays isn't anything too special, the usual late-life ruminations on the circle of stuff, the poignancy of objects, the importance of Christmas ornaments (um, nothing like this blog) but Roz's cover and inside comic are awesome. She is welcome to attach herself to Thingummery: The Nonexistent Book Proposal, if she ever wants to.

Did you know Roz is also a crazy bird lady? This snippet from the NYT is great.

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.

Notes on camp

This weekend Lindsay is taking our younger daughter camping at the zoo. What a saint, right? It sounds like the opposite of fun to me—organized activities, no alcohol permitted and the hooting of the trains keeps you up all night. But he loves camping and between these zoo overnights and daddy-daughter camping weekends in various state parks, he's instilled a love of camping in our kids. So far I've managed to stay out of it, though I'm not sure how much longer I'll get away with it. All of my excuses—mommies aren't allowed to camp at the zoo!—have been contradicted by reality. Right now my stance is that I won't camp until we get a vintage Airstream or a teardrop trailer or anything that resembles the Barbie camper I had in my 70s youth (my kids have an identical one that I scored at an estate sale last summer). I love the vintage trappings of camping! Like these books—so cute. But actual camping? Do I have to?

You'd think that with an Eagle Scout for a father, I would be an accomplished camper by now, but I've never camped a day in my life. I never even went to sleepaway camp. In sixth grade, I went on a three-day field trip to a place called Thunder Mountain in Pennsylvania, but we stayed in cabins so I don't think that counts. And when I was in junior high, me and my friend Anne pitched a tent in my backyard but the night ended early, after some high school boys thrillingly put a dead fish in our tent. Truth is, I don't really know what my problem is with camping—I'm actually a big fan of nature, and not just as it's depicted in the super-saturated colors of vintage books. And considering that I've been stung by scorpions and bitten by tarantulas in the comfort of my own home, I'm not uptight about the critters. Probably it's just that I like my time alone when he takes them both camping. I go on shopping expeditions to ikea, to flea markets, to as many estate sales as I feel like in a single day. I run twice as far as I usually do, and eat ice cream for lunch. I take myself out to the movies and see things like Jane Eyre. I stay up all night watching old Masterpiece Theaters on Netflix. In other words, I totally party! This weekend it won't be quite like that—my older daughter has aged out of the zoo program so we'll be able to have a girlz nite of some kind. Haven't decided what we're doing yet—she wants to go out to dinner and then see Mirror Mirror but I'm more inclined to subject her to a marathon viewing of Pride & Prejudice on Netflix. She is almost 9—isn't she ready? Maybe if I say we can have ice cream for dinner...

Mug shots

We have a small mug and cup problem at our house, and judging by what I see at garage sales, Goodwills and inside other people's kitchen cabinets, we are not alone. I try to keep ten or so in rotation; the rest are in the garage, taking up about as much space as a car would, if we were to ever actually attempt to park a car in our garage. Why don't I just get rid of the excess? Why do I even need 10 when only two coffee drinkers reside here? I use the same Tord Boontje-for-Target cups every day because I think they're pretty and they fit nicely under the spout of my Nespresso. I have three of them; one broke and two more are stored in the garage. Also in the garage: all the boring white Villeroy and Boch cups from my ill-chosen wedding china. Cups with corporate logos from Lindsay's old jobs, my old jobs, friends' old jobs. Novelty cups, joke cups and cups with photos of children emblazoned on them, ours and other people's. (Nothing sadder than seeing that particular genre of mug at an estate sale. Who buys a mug with someone else's kid on it?) We all need to agree to just say no to giving each other cups henceforth, unless they are very beautiful and made in Scandinavia.

Before Tord Boontje did his Target thing (I don't think there was a better designer/Target collaboration), I regularly used this Maw cup, purchased, along with its Paw counterpart, at some estate sale shortly after I moved to Texas. The Snuffy Smith vibe spoke to me, fresh as I was from New Yawk City and carving out a new homestead—my little "country estate" in the exburbs. The problem with vintage cups (and glassware) is that you can't really put them in the dishwasher, and I'm not so country that I'm going to hand-wash my dishes if I don't have to. Plus, Lindsay started getting anxious about breaking his Paw cup, even though they're not valuable—you can easily score a pair on etsy for five or ten bucks. Quite replaceable, nevertheless they've been exiled to the china closet. At least they're not in the garage.