Disappointed!

Please read the title in the voice of Kevin Kline in "A Fish Called Wanda". I can't use the word anymore without thinking of him and I love that there's a video of this moment on YouTube.

The other day I dreamed that I was travelling. I can't tell you the country and also not the first part of the dream because there's just a vague idea left of visiting an older lady.
Anyhow, I went to a beach I didn't recognize and half buried in the sand was a small open cardboard box which contents had spilled out on the sand. There were tumbled rocks, golden chains (not real), charms, a pretty wild mix. It looked as someone got rid of their old jewelry making supplies.
Of course I had to go through the box right away and I took apart clumps of golden chain, I picked some rocks and just enjoyed having a look at everything.
You may wonder why I didn't just take the whole box, but I remember thinking that I should leave some for the next person and indeed another person showed up in the end.

Picture via pxhere

When I woke up, I was a little disappointed for a second and didn't even know why. Then it came to me.

It hadn't been the first time I had a dream like that. I know from other collectors that they had similar ones.
Collectors are weird.
Over the years, a lot of my dreams about all kinds of things or events have been very vivid and I can still remember quite a few of them, also because there are recurring themes or locations.
No worries, I'm not going to tell you all of them now 😉

One of them is the department store dream.
I have obviously gone back in time and am in a huge store in the toy department. I only remember it in black and white. Despite having had dreams in black and white, I think that my memory is deceiving me in this case and I blame two episodes from TV shows for that - "Death at Bargain Prices" from "The Avengers" and "The After Hours" from "The Twilight Zone" both of which are set in a department store and both of which are favorite episodes of mine.
(This was before I watched "Are You Being Served?" or they might have been in color.)

What I definitely still know, however, is that I feel completely overwhelmed by the collection of pristine Steiff animals (pre-war) or Barbie dolls from the 60s - at the prices of that time.
Weirdly, it's always only one or the other. I guess my brain thinks I wouldn't be able to handle both at a time, but actually I can't even handle one.
For some reason, I'm standing there knowing I don't have a means of transportation and can't have them all, but how to choose?
There has never been an ending so far which may be for the better. Possibly it would end with my having to be dragged off the store floor because I'm losing my mind 😂

Other dreams take me to a street round the corner where I used to live as a child, to different antique shops. I have no idea why they are always in that street because there has never been any shop at all there in my time.
Not the one on the corner which has a lot of books, but also a few glass cases with small Steiff animals sitting between jewelry or trinkets. Most of them are not special, but there's always one that catches my eye.
Not the one on the other corner which seems to be a mix of jewelry and antique shop.
And not the one in a basement with some steps leading down (no doubt inspired by two real shops in different streets which had stationery, office supplies, and things like that and which went away decades ago), but with a window on street level where I once saw a row of Steiff wool miniatures sitting, at the original price, the most beautiful pre-war ones ever. I woke up just when I wanted to go inside. That one hit hard because I was so close and it really took me a while to realize it had just been a dream. I almost expected them to sit in my cabinet.

These cuties don't live me with anymore which is
probably for the better given Gundel's history
(I'm of course referring to the Christmas massacre of 2018)

I haven't had one of these dreams in a while. I also haven't been at fleamarkets or fairs in years.
That doesn't mean I have forgotten or never miss the thrill of the hunt which makes up a fair share of the collecting experience. Mind you, I wasn't a very good hunter (I hung around in front of book boxes too much) and maybe that added to the disappointment after waking up from such a dream when I thought I had found something really good? 😉

Have you ever gone thrifting in a dream?

Random Saturday - Purple and green

If you expect something about color coordination in art or fashion, you're wrong, sorry. This is just another post about memories which is inspired by a post written by Nicole from Huisvlijt, "Kringloop Tristesse".
I don't speak Dutch, but from the Firefox translation I get it's about a water can that a school class gave to a teacher and it ended up in a thrift shop still with that tag on.
No idea how it is in other countries, but in my time gifts for teachers were not a big thing, at least not in my school. So I asked a teacher I know how it is today, and he too said that it happens, but not often.

We had one teacher, however, who got several gifts from part of the class, and that was a running joke.
One of my classmates loved the color purple and wore it a lot and said teacher didn't like purple. I don't know what the exact reason was, but he once told my classmate jokingly that purple wasn't a color, but a punishment.
So of course our whole row decided to give him something purple. My friend was a former baker's daughter and good at baking herself - how I loved her Christmas cookies! - and suggested a marble cake, but with purple and pink food dye. It was a big hit (I have no idea if our teacher ate any of it, though).
Anyhow, from then on, he always got something purple at the end of the school year. Nothing big of course, just to keep the joke alive, and we always tried to make it something useful or consumable, so it wouldn't take up unnecessary space.

One year, another teacher said jokingly how much we "spoiled" him (they had become a couple although we didn't know it yet at the time) and another friend of mine told her to pick a color. She said green. That friend did macrame and knitted socks like crazy - it was the 80s and a lot of pupils knitted in class - so she made a beautiful pair of green socks as a Christmas gift, much to our teacher's surprise but also delight.
So from then on we had to get something purple and something green.

Picture by Konevi via pxhere

I even kept the tradition running for several years after leaving school. A lot of my school friends left town to work elsewhere or study, but I lived at home during training as a librarian and my teachers didn't live far from me.
One time, my teacher handed me a little parcel saying "ok, so sometimes purple can be beautiful if it's on the right thing".
It was a framed picture of a purple Porsche (he had a vintage one himself, not purple but red). I don't know if I still have that picture somewhere, but I remember it really made me laugh back then.

Picture by Alex Ifti via Unsplash

So yeah, that's my little story of an "apple for the teacher".
Is it common for children to give their teachers a gift where you are?