Gifts from my Mother

My mother knows that I have a few antiques, and she is always on the lookout for some to give me. She has only a tenuous understanding of the word antique. Over the years, she has given me some odd "antiques", like:



Yes, a bed pan. The one she gave me (and I felt compelled to take it) was blue. I sold it at a lawn sale for 50 cents. An elderly gay man talked me down from my original asking price of $1. "The only problem," he said, "is that this (he pointed to the spout) is not wide enough." It was only much later that someone suggested to me that he was probably cruising me. Anyway, he assured me that he would use this thing.

In the recent box of surprises, there was:

- a very heavy and ornate liquor glass with a huge chip on the rim. It is ugly and broken and on its way to a landfill site.

- a coffee mug made of dark brown glass with a white etching of an automobile from 1910. So, while not actually an antique, it makes reference to one. Again, this is enjoying a new life in a garbage dump.

- an embroidered pillow case. It's actually quite nice, but I wonder where it came from.

- a series of gaudy postcards with infantile jokes on the front. They look like they came from the 70s.

- a broken transistor radio from the late 60s or early 70s. More landfill.

- and three things that deserve individual posts. More on that later.

And now, I have to write that big report I have been putting off.

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