Three Things on my Shopping List

Good afternoon!

What, only three things? Yes, on my permanent shopping list there are three things that I will buy whenever and wherever I find them. However, I almost never do any more.

The first thing is a 1970 or earlier Mirado No. ONE yellow pencil.  What a wonderful pencil that was.  It wrote black. Very black. And it was wonderfully crafted in that, though soft and black, it held up for sharpening very well.

Did you know that Mirado pencils started out as Mikado pencils? When World War Two concentrated the national anxiety and hate upon the Japanese, the name of the pencil was changed to Mirado.  I had always loved the Japanese Mikado (don't know why...reincarnation, I guess) and I remember that at age ten or eleven it was hard to adjust to a new image for my favorite pencil.

It blows my mind to think that, as late as the eighties, I could stroll into the Savon Drugs on Point Loma and buy one, ten, or a whole box of Mirado No. 1 pencils.  Made in the USA, of course. And oh, how I wish I had bought ten boxes. I miss them. No, they aren't the same any more.

The next thing on my shopping list is the homely dime store scrapbook. These unappreciated items were large bulky and rather unattractive things with fillers of coarse brown or black paper, and they were meant for pasting things into. Where did they go?  When "scrapbooking" became a national art instead of the refuge of the lonely widder or spinster or bed-bound child with a pair of scissors, the scrapbook became an expensive cumbersome holder for artistic activity instead of the receptor of items jaggedly cut out from a newpaper or magazine and glued in with school-room paste, a procedure which could take hours of pleasurable time.  I want some tacky old fashioned scrapbooks for all the junk I am uprooting from boxes and bags in my old age. If my grandchildren don't want these scrapbooks, I can imagine that there are plenty of other people in the world who'd enjoy looking at the detritus of my life.

And the third item is the one you should all be looking for yourselves, folks--it's the utensils for kitchen use manufactured in the USA from 1900, say, to 1990, say.  If it is steel, was made here, has USA on it, it is going to be worth a lot of money in twenty years in the future. Spatulas, kitchen forks, runcible spoons, knives...sifters, strainers, pots, pans, they'll all be here in a thousand years if we take care of them, and they will be worth a lot of money by folks who don't fancy using klutzy stuff from other lands who are posing as steelmakers.

Those are three things I am always looking for. You used to find the kitchen stuff (American made) routinely in thrift shops...try to find them there now. Pencils? Forget it--except at garage sales where there are still homes where the old folks hoarded American made pencils for years...buy the lot, buy the lot.  And scrapbooks? I am told that they are still around in stores, that I just haven't found the store. In the long long ago people cut pages out of brown kraft paper and sewed them together to make their scrapbooks.  Get out your garage sale scissors and get to work, as long as we can still buy craft paper. YAZZYBEL