Thrift Shop Finds

It’s been two years since I left teaching, and I’ve missed my friends from the middle school. Every once in a while there’s been an email and a sputtering attempt at getting together, but you know how it is. People get busy in their separate lives and months go by without any contact and before long even the folks with whom you once greeted every morning and weathered great adventures and worked with side by side -- yes, even they grow distant and begin to feel like strangers. Unless someone gets proactive and persistent and creative. And someone did.

In this case it was Donna, who grabbed me at the graduation and gave me a two-week framework in which to choose a date when I could join her, Lynne, and Julie fo ran expedition to the thrift stores of Ventura.

NowI realize there are those to whom this probably sounds like a voluntary field trip into purgatory, but I genuinely like thrift stores. Maybe it goes back to the days on Coney Island Avenue when neighbors with older children would deposit big bags of outgrown clothing at our door, or when my father’s affluent customers would send their hand-me-downs home with him. It never would have occurred to us to be offended. This was not charity but a kind of sharing that was quite customary and a lot of fun. My sister and I would go through the bags with greed and glee, choosing what was hers and what was mine. We seldom went shopping for anything brand new, and we felt no deprivation about that; those hand-me-down bags seemed like big friendly surprise packages, and all of it new to us.

Aside from those positive childhood associations connected to other people’s used stuff, I like the story and mystery of a good thrift store, the untold tales behind the wedding dresses that end up so un-cherished, or the small wonder of a tarnished silver butter dish with an ornate monogram finding its place among a line-up of old coffeemakers and lampshades. Broken chairs once mended with wire, bric-brac so awful as to be funny, the slightly stretched out cashmere sweater among the teeny tacky tops from Forever 21 -- it's like a random gathering of orphans, or passengers disembarking from a Greyhound bus, cigarette-voiced malingerers who aren't sure where they're headed but have been around the block a couple of times. It's like piles of unpublished manuscripts, and maybe one of them is good. If approached in the right spirit, a thrift store provides a rambunctious sort of evidence that anything can happen. It's all about unlikely outcomes and the persistent possibility of discovery.

I suppose it is also about stuff, though, and how there is way too much of it. A quick stroll through the aisles of any thrift store is all the evidence we need that our species has produced enough junk for all eternity. With a bit of repair and redistribution, we could pretty much stop right here. But maybe that’s another thing that makes thrift store shopping so satisfying. It provides all the fun of recreational shopping without requiring the production of new goods. It’s a guilt free fix and the price is right and the money usually goes to a worthy nonprofit organization.

 But enough about the rationalization. Let’s focus on the fun.

 First you have to picture four giggling women rifling through the racks.

 “Oh,Donna! Check this out. It’s so YOU!”

 “Would I wear this? Even though it’s purple? Even though it’s very sheer?”

“And just my size!”

 “Pink suede high-heeled boots! And they’re just my size!”

Some people enjoy careening about like pinballs, planlessly pinging here and there. As for me, I already have a bit of ADD going on, so it helps to start out with a quest. I decided that I was on the hunt for long ballroom gloves to give to my neighbor Jeanne for berry picking. I never found any, but it gave me a focus. 

Julie, on the other hand, was searching for summer shirts for her husband, and she found several -- one of them was silk. 

“Can you picture Marc in a silk shirt?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” I lied. 

But despite its being made of silk, it was quite a casual-looking shirt, a short-sleeved blue print I could imagine someone wearing at a cabaña, looking cool and eating coconuts and listening to Cuban music.

(I digress.)

Donna, as it turns out, has a good eye – among other things, she picked up an elegant wine-colored shawl and a smart looking suede jacket that looked like it was tailored just for her.

Lynne, to our disappointment, did not actually buy those pink boots, but she did find a classy silk blouse and some workout clothes.

My favorite purchase was a heavy wool pullover with a beautiful knit design – I now have something chic to wear if I ever go for a winter trek in the Norwegian fjords.

I also came upon an unusual black lace jacket that I somehow thought might be a cute little evening cover-up over a spaghetti-strap dress. Hard to explain -- the black lace fabric contrasted with the garment’s crisp cut, sort of Morticia Addams meets Mary Tyler Moore. I called my daughter to see if she might like it. 

“Mom, what you’ve described so far sounds sort of frightening,” she said. 

Note to self: do not attempt to shop for daughter, especially not here.

Not trying to shop for my daughter was only one of many important lessons I learned from yesterday’s adventure. Put four girlfriends together for an afternoon and you’ve got a virtual tutorial on life. Women generously share the narratives of their experiences and the wisdom gleaned. We can't help it. 

One thing we have apparently all discovered is that with age we’ve become a bit more tolerant of others, more willing to accept the faults because we also see the good, or maybe because we realize how flawed we are ourselves. On the other hand, as Julie pointed out, getting older shouldn’t mean becoming lazy and complacent: it’s healthy to be pissed off about something! May we never get used to injustice, may we never accept what we know isn’t right, and let’s not leave the fight solely to the young. 

With a story or two of her own, Lynne reminded us that it is essential to speak out sometimes -- feels damned good, in fact. On the other hand, Julie wisely warned that it is equally essential to know when to keep your mouth shut, and I’m working on that one. Meanwhile Donna reminded me with her very demeanor -- and what I know of her history and accomplishments -- that the limits of determination and resilience are so far off as to be invisible.

We reminisced, of course. Remember that first year when we took 66 kids to Washington, D.C. and none of us quite knew what we were doing? Remember when we went camping and had to figure out how to put up that enormous tent while the wind was howling? 

Didn’t we laugh a lot? 

I thought about the festivals and deck meetings, the teaching that happens in the classroom and behind the scenes, the routines and intimacy that made us like a family, and the dramas both personal and historical that seared our souls together even more than we knew. The greatest find of all from our thrift shop day was rediscovering our friendship and making it current again.