The Button Bar (or one of many)

 

Did everyone have a button bar? Or is this just something our dear mother made up to use up scraps of fabric and also all the ridiculous scads of buttons that we accumulated throughout our childhood? This is just one of several such button bars, which decorated our bedroom throughout our childhood. We loved buttons, and they did seem to find us, and as we recall, they were rarely actively sought out or purchased, they just seemed to happen. (This is still the case with buttons in our life, except for one brief button-making phase that we went through, but that’s done now.)

Displayed above, as you can see, are a button from Sick Kids Hospital from the glamourous time we attended the taping of the telethon. Also, an Owl magazine button, probably obtained from the Word on the Street book festival lo these many years ago. And there’s a button celebrating CHCH channel 11, and we have no idea what that one is about. As you can see, we weren’t picky about our buttons – any and all buttons were welcome on our button bar. We’re pickier now, and buttons are displayed on the bulletin board above our desk instead of on random scraps of fabric. Maturity!

Monetary value: Ooh, a CHCH button! $o.oo

Nostalgic value: Meh. We do wish we could remember more about that Sick Kids telethon taping, though, because we’re pretty sure we had the best time there.

Disposal status: Trash.

 

 

The Desktop Mini-Drawers

True, this little set of drawers isn’t much to look at. It was probably meant to organize nails or something. But we found tiny little drawers irresistible and filled them with all manner of nonsense, from foreign coinage to embroidery floss. And this little set of drawers made (we thought) the perfect cashbox, should we ever need one.

We did, as it turned out. We fancied ourself a charitable youth, and one afternoon when we were about 11, we set up shop – complete with cashbox – on our sidewalk, selling lemonade, cookies, and homemade worry dolls to passersby, assuring everyone that the proceeds would go directly to charity. We failed to specify which charity, exactly, but we were pretty cute with our puffy hair, big glasses, Blue Jays cap, and oversized sweatshirt (plus, most of the passersby were neighbours and friends of our parents), so we managed to make a whopping $25.

But we couldn’t decide where to send it, and while we were too young to have our chequebook, we were old enough to realize that you shouldn’t send cash through the mail, especially when most of it is loonies and quarters. We fretted for a couple of days, and then put the cashbox (cash still within) in our room, where we felt a surge of guilt every time we caught a glimpse of that stack of loonies and wad of two-dollar bills.

And thus it was for the better part of two decades, until we unearthed this now-worthless stack of two-dollar bills and still spendable stack of loonies. Naturally, being the sap that we are, we felt that knee-jerk surge of guilt…until we realized (a) that we have paid our self-enforced debt of $25 to whatever charity several times over and (b) we hadn’t made it to the bank machine like we meant to that day and needed those 13 loonies for beer money. Then we emptied out the rest of the drawers (and found the Florida Taiwan orange!) and went to the bar.

Monetary value: $2. It would hold a lot of nails, if you needed that sort of thing. But it’s kind of grody from so many years in the basement.

Nostalgic value: Meh. We’re still concerned that we hoodwinked everyone nice enough to pay us $.50 for a cup of lemonade. In 1993 that was a lot of money!

Disposal status: Drawer box – giveaway. Cash – spent at bar. Except for the two-dollar bills. We’re pretty sure those are worthless now.

The first (and only) crossstitch project

We were a typically crafty and creative type of child, and we also occasionally had whimsical ideas about old-timey-seeming things like embroidery. We weren’t talented enough to tackle actual embroidery, but simple counted cross-stitch was right up our alley for about two weeks, or however long it took us to finish this little project. Of course our favourite part of this little exercise was the embroidery floss, those shiny skeins that still send shivers of delight up our spine. Of course, after our brief foray into counted cross-stitch we realized it was pretty boring, akin to a colouring book made of sewing. But our love of embroidery floss lingered on – we made worry dolls of all likenesses and, of course, countless friendship bracelets.

Monetary value: Ha!

Nostalgic value: We’d rather have found the friendship bracelets, frankly.

Disposal status: Tossed.

Tupperware organizer, possibly inspired by Mies van der Roeh

Our dear mother, in her admirable but Quixotic quest to be more organized, has an irresistible attraction to knick knacks and such things that promise to help one organize things. One such example is this Tupperware holder, which came with specially shaped Tupperware designed to stack inside its cheap plastic edges. The Tuppeware itself is fine, and getting plenty of weekly use stored, as it is, in our parents’ kitchen drawer. But this ugly and unwieldy hunk of plastic was more successful as a concept than as an actual object. It’s too hideous to live on the kitchen counter, but when placed in the Tupperware drawer it takes over, leaving no room for all the other necessary pieces of Tupperware.

Nostalgia value: None, really, although it is somewhat tempting to use this thing to sculpt replicas of unappealing modern architecture.

Disposal status: Garbage. It’s not that tempting.

The Maroon Phone

This phone does not count as crap. We will put up a fight for this phone if we ever have a land line again. This phone is one of the, if not THE greatest piece from the Basement Collection.

In the old house (that is, the house we moved out of in 1992), the maroon phone’s aesthetic wonder went overlooked in our father’s basement office, where the grubby hands of three daughters under ten could do minimal damage. Over the years, it was claimed by various family members who, for whatever reasons, valued aesthetics over being able to check phone messages. The maroon phone has a satisfying ring, a proper ring, not the robotic beeping of a modern phone. Dialing the maroon phone is an appealing audio sensory experience, with the comforting whirr of the rotary dial and the muted ding in between each number.

We blame the possession of this phone for the fact that our youngest sister picks things like old-timey meat grinders up from the sidewalk and brings them home.

Dollar value: $100,000,000.00

Nostaligia value: Come on.

Disposal status: Never.