Atlantis Online
March 28, 2024, 01:06:20 pm
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: USA showered by a watery comet ~11,000 years ago, ending the Golden Age of man in America
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20050926/mammoth_02.html
 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links Staff List Calendar Login Register  

The Things They Left Behind (for Sale)

Pages: [1]   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: The Things They Left Behind (for Sale)  (Read 99 times)
0 Members and 66 Guests are viewing this topic.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« on: December 07, 2008, 10:28:02 am »










                                          The Things They Left Behind (for Sale)
             





By YONA ZELDIS MCDONOUGH
Published: December 5, 2008
The New York Times

VIEWS of the water are lovely and trips down the ski slope bracing, but when I travel, nothing gets
my blood going faster than the chance to paw through other people’s castoff belongings.


I remember my trips based on the thrift shops I’ve frequented, those brave little places tucked somewhere between the local auto body shop and the Dunkin’ Donuts or in the least desirable slot of the strip mall.

A word of clarification: I’m not talking about antiques shops, though I’ve enjoyed those too. But I’ve learned that the word “antiques” anywhere on the sign usually means a place filled with stuff that has already been edited down, gussied up and thoroughly merchandised. Not so with thrift stores, which offer a much more direct — and to my mind, more authentic — pipeline into the particular place in which they are lodged. That’s because each thrift store is different. The shops are the ultimate anti-chain: idiosyncratic, unpredictable and filled with diamonds in the rough for those who know how to mine. A seemingly sleepy thrift shop on the Jersey Shore — all swirling dust motes and faint waft of decades-old perfume — will tell you as much about the place as any map or guidebook; maybe even more.

Thrift shops in East Hampton, N. Y., are a good case in point, stocked as they are with the high-end castoffs befitting the tony town. This is where to hunt for the leavings of people with appetites for high culture and good clothes, and the money to indulge both. It is at these places that you might find, as I did, a coral-colored double breasted wool coat that Jackie Kennedy could have worn, a lushly illustrated oversize volume called “Balanchine’s Ballerinas: Conversations With the Muses” and a brand-new, price-tag-still-on-it black leather skirt from Banana Republic. Total cost for this haul: $58.

At the Pink Door in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., there is less wool and more polyester. Glass beats out crystal, and plastic trumps both. But it was at the Bargain Box in Winter Park, Fla., that I found the set of hangers with the hand-crocheted wool covers: red, orange, yellow, blue, bottle green and a subtle heathered peach. Here was the patient labor of someone with more time than money but with an inborn sense of elegance that no amount of money would ever be able to buy. I took the whole batch — 24 in all — quietly awed by the skill and perseverance of their creator.
Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter

Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #1 on: December 07, 2008, 10:31:40 am »









Then there’s the staff. The men and women who work in these places offer their own special windows onto the local culture. At the Pink Door or the Bargain Box, you’re apt to rub shoulders with blue-haired women who wear their glasses on beaded chains and their shoes thickly cushioned. These comforting, grandmotherly types look as if they have come straight from their stints at choir practice or organizing a church picnic.

The women behind the counter at Elsa’s Ark in Southampton are a more soignée crew — blond streaks, frosted lipstick, sweater sets and big, pearl clip-ons. But they are all united in their urge to help, to direct and to dispense their plentiful and often sound advice. I am thinking of the tiny, deeply tanned woman with perfectly shellacked bouffant and false lashes at a shop in Katonah, N.Y. She carefully watched as I modeled a voluminous black YSL silk blouse with red polka dots in front of the mirror.

“No one is going to see that fancy label,” she said, with two definitive blinks of those lashes. ”All they are going to see is you in a blouse that’s two sizes too big.” Case closed. I put the offending garment back on the rack and continued my search.

Not to be overlooked are the Salvation Army and Goodwill stores, which are the Old Faithfuls of the thrift store genre. I respect their humble yet democratic system of organization, the shoes, books and kitchenware each in their own separate nooks, the racks and racks of clothing, thoughtfully organized first by type, and then by color. At the Salvation Army in Vernon, Conn., I scored a gold and black brocade dress with a short-sleeve matching jacket, an ensemble in which Barbie — I mean the very first, 1959-issue doll — would have felt right at home. In Manhattan, such a garment would have been labeled “vintage” and had the price tag to match; in Vernon, it had no doubt resided in someone’s basement closet for the last half-century, and was now being offered without so much as a whiff of irony.

A visit to another Salvation Army, this one on Main Street in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., yielded a pair of cobalt-and-white Spode dishes and an ironstone platter whose Norman Rockwell-inspired sincerity was fairly baked into its modest and unassuming white glaze. I could just see the Dutchess County Thanksgiving at which these objects had presided: the platter groaning from the weight of the turkey, the fruit-stuffed pies that crowned the plates.
Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #2 on: December 07, 2008, 10:34:34 am »










What I’ve found, as I’ve hunted, is more than mere stuff:

I’ve tapped into the soul of the cities and the towns I’ve visited.

I’m treated to an oblique yet intimate glimpse of the residents, not always face to face but by what they leave behind, the orphaned goblets and the chipped saucers cramming the shelves of a thrift store not far from Boston, the yellowed tea towels embroidered with pansies unearthed in Portsmouth, N.H., the three-foot-long model ship in Daytona Beach, dust-coated sails still starched and ready for a southerly breeze to set the thing afloat.

These are my talismans, my mementos, my relics of journeys taken, places discovered.

Forget digital cameras, postcards, matchbooks or menus; my own memory bank is filled with an Irish linen dress the color of an April sky, and a cunningly designed stainless steel cake icing tube with six nozzles, each of a different size and all still housed in their original circa 1955 box. Both hailed from the same out-of-the-way thrift shop in Castine, Me.

The name of that shop now eludes me, but its oversize picture window — bordered by a lace curtain and filled with glorious late-summer light — will be with me forever.
Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
G T Samatoshi
Full Member
***
Posts: 19



« Reply #3 on: December 17, 2008, 11:54:40 am »

If you ever come across any 8mm films, I got a projector. Cheesy
Report Spam   Logged

And they say that a hero can save us, I'm not gonna stand here and wait.
I'll hold onto the wings of the eagles, watch as we all fly away.
Pages: [1]   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum
Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy