Of all the puzzles about my own habits of consumption, one that has been nagging at me lately is the question of how I got so deep into the habit of going to thrift shops and buying things second hand. I've been thinking about this, and my best theory is, oddly enough, for the sake of vanity. 

Growing up, I was the oldest of four siblings and twenty grandchildren--if anything, I was most often on the giving and not the receiving end of hand-me-downs. (I remember The Year It Didn't Snow, when all the families went into their closets and pulled out their skates. Everyone tried them on, and handed down the ones that didn't fit. Of course this left me with no skates at all, and I can still picture standing in the aisle at the local Ames store picking out a brand new pair with my dad.) My family wasn't wealthy--not by a long shot--but we usually bought things new, though on sale if possible. Bargain hunting was the big thing with my mom and my aunts. It was never considered rude to talk openly about the great deals you got, even on someone's gift. This was a sign of resourcefulness and luck, like an extra blessing upon the item at hand. Only once do I recall getting hand-me-downs, from our older, wiser, more hip, and also oddly enough more religious second cousins who lived in the magically distant big city and its suburbs. It was a pretty exciting bunch of stuff, I think--being a reader I mainly cherished the big pile of books, though, and paid little attention to the rest. 

In high school I had a job at a local department store, a regional chain with national brands that I started to follow through catalogs and magazines. This allowed me money to spend on clothes, an employee discount, and notice of when things were to be marked down, and by the time I left for college, I was pretty well hooked.

Shock of shocks then when the relative poverty of college set in, and I found I could no longer afford my clothing habit. But rather than suck it up and stop buying so much, instead I drifted toward frequenting the thrift shops in my college town. For the most part I think the first few trips were made out of curiosity more than anything. This gave me somewhere to walk to on a rainy Saturday afternoon, somewhere to go besides the gym or the local used book shop. Soon, I was thinking about bargain hunting in terms of scaring up interesting finds in church basements and spare storefronts. 

One of those early finds sealed the thrift shop deal for me, I now believe. It was a 1960s minidress--kelly green with dark turquoise polka dots, falling about 2 inches above the knee but definitely below my substantial bottom, and with a large green tulle (maybe?) collar all the way around it, not unlike a clown's collar. One of the polka dots had begun to wear off, leaving a white smudge; I fixed it with a magic marker. I remember the first time I wore that dress: to a dorm room party with a group of friends that I desperately wanted to impress. I was from a small town, and had grown up in the bubble of a close knit family. Everyone I met at school seemed to have grown up in interesting places very far away, and many had traveled extensively abroad--they seemed extremely cool and cosmopolitan. I was delighted and immensely relieved when I arrived to find that they LOVED, and I mean, LOVED the dress. And that's all it took. Thrift appeared to be my ticket to carving a little niche out for myself, and so I threw myself into rummaging for unusual items, spending just as much as I might have at department stores, and too often considerably more than I really had, because I dreamed of being received every day with the enthusiasm that my clothes had elicited that night. 

 Years later, I wore that dress again. Right before I outgrew it forever it got an especially great showing at a B52s concert at Jones Beach, NY. And as it had the first time, and every time in between, the dress functioned as what I thought of as a near-perfect combination of shield and sword. Armed in thrift, I thought, no one could touch me. And so I made thrift the focus of my spendthrift ways.