Saved by a Blue Tag Sale

On sunny late August afternoon when I should have been working but wasn’t, when I might have been doing the laundry but wasn’t, when I might have been swimming across Puffer Pond but wasn’t, when a sort of MacBethian gloom was threatening to overtake me and it seemed that life as a divorcee in the twilight of middle age was one frogmarch to the grave, I jumped in my car and drove to Salvation Army.

Many other people must have been similarly afflicted because I could barely find a place to park. Once in the store, I grasped the simpler explanation: It was Family Day, and there were fifty percent off on all items with blue, yellow, or green tags, which is to say that nearly everything was marked down. There were four cashiers, and they couldn’t keep up with the demand: the line snaked past the books, beanie babies, and shoes. There were mothers with shopping carts full of clothes, girls in tiny jeans scoring microwaves, teenage boys looking for that special baseball cap that would up their coolness factor on the first day of school.

I had actually come with a mission. I was in search of a cheese grater and a shower caddy, my ex having ended up with the cheese grater, which I had failed to replace all these months after the divorce due to my poor executive function and housekeeping skills, factors which were one of the many causes of our divorce. I could not blame my lack of a shower caddy on my ex—I had actually never owned one, since I always preferred baths, but my new home (the second in seven months, a long tale that does not improve with the telling) had a shower but no bathtub. After having spent the last several months bemoaning the fact that I was being deprived of the one pleasure that I had always counted on (retreating to the tub when the going got tough), I decided to stop whining, embrace showering, and get a shower caddy.

I had already priced both of these items at Bed Bath & Beyond, and I figured if I could save ten or twenty dollars by getting them used, I would be doing my budget a favor.

There are shelves and shelves of household items at the Salvation Army on Route 9 in Hadley—coffee mugs, teapots, covered casserole dishes. Used dishes are so plentiful that they are displayed in monochromatic color combinations: all white on one shelf, all blue on another, and so on. But among all this cornucopia of cast-off housewifery from the dead, the divorced, and the displaced, there was not one cheese grater. Ditto for the shower caddy. However, I did spot a particularly handsome steel-cased Thermos with a blue plastic lid for $1.57. I didn’t need it, as I had recently purchased a handsome pink-and-silver travel mug from the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, but I decided that a little proactivity was not a bad thing. Despite all my best efforts to control my Attention Deficit Disorder (no doubt yet another cause of the divorce), I was not likely to hang onto my pretty Canadian mug for more than a few weeks.

But, Mon Dieu, the line! After deciding that the mug was really worth the wait, I rewarded myself with a handful of peanut M &M’s from the candy dispenser by the exit. You only got four M & M’s for your quarter, and that they were stale, which I thought a bit cheesy but which also reminded me of that great Woody Allen joke about the two old ladies at the resort at the Catskills, one of whom complains that the food is terrible, to which the other answers, and so little of it!

It was almost four o’clock, which meant I would not be getting to my favorite thrift venue in the Pioneer Valley—Hospice Shop of the Fisher Home, where I had, over the past year, scored tea towels, cushions, and curtains as well as, just last week, a beautiful Red Sox cap for my son. But no worries, the Goodwill in Amherst stayed open until seven.

The problem with looking for specific things in thrift shops is that you rarely find them, which is to say there was neither a cheese grater nor shower caddy in the entire store. However, I did spot a box of perfectly good Van Gogh note cards from the Museum of Fine Arts for $2.50. “The House of Auvers” with its swirling blues and greens and white breathy clouds was on the cover. Inside was the radiant blue-and-gold figure of “Postman Joseph Roulin,” as well as “Enclosed Field with Ploughman” with its spectacular waves of blue and gold and the virtually unknown “Ravine,” A very cheery, older woman spotted the cards in my red plastic basket and said, “Look at those cards! You just never know the treasures you’re going to find here!” The young woman working the cash register confided that she had almost bought the cards herself, and then launched into a long narrative about her love affair with Van Gogh and a recent trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York expressly to see “Starry Night.”

“Everything changes,” Ovid observed, long before the advent of thrift stores or the profusion of divorce, “nothing is lost.” When I returned home, without the items I had been searching for, but with a new-to-me cup and nearly new box of cards, I felt changed, saved by a blue tag sale. All posts copyright© 2012. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author