Nifty Thrifty

It was a dark and stormy Friday afternoon two weeks before Christmas and my two friends, their kooky dog and I rolled through Bandon after picking up groceries. We were spending a holiday weekend together and making considerable merry. Believe me, making up profane Christmas carols is a lot of fun, as is making up story lines for profane Hallmark Christmas specials, especially the one about Santa’s fudge factory.

Earlier on the drive into town, I had spotted a tiny sawhorse sign advertising Nifty Thrifty. It pointed in a direction east off Highway 101. I am a great connoisseur of coastal thrift stores, and indeed, my life has been dramatically improved by purchases and donations related to these shops. I could write a book about them and maybe I will.

This shop, however, was new to me, and I couldn’t pass it up! So after the grocery run, we planned on a stop and find the diamond in the rough that always come with these joints.

We found the shop, which was a house, and a tired two-storey one at that. It stood on a huge double or triple lot and had an outbuilding or two behind it. I also noticed a scrawny grove of fruit trees off to the left and a brand new fifth wheel out back.

My friend pulled his vehicle over. He would wait with the dog, listen to Frank Sinatra and fart, while my other friend and I scoped out the offerings.

We exited the vehicle and walked on wet grass toward a deck. There was a rivulet of mud to cross before we could take a couple of steps up to the deck and then into the shop. A young man standing on the deck hailed us hello and told us to use the large rubber mat he had placed over the rivulet. We took his advice and seconds later found ourselves being ushered into the store, which amounted to one narrow room, an oddly-shaped bedroom in its former life. The man said he would also open another room for us. His wife was just now stocking it.

Just now?

It dawned on me that we had walked into Nifty Thrifty’s opening day and we were its first customers.

We stepped inside the room. It had shelves on either side displaying, well, coastal thrift store stock. In a closet off to the side was a bit more stock, mostly DVDs. I checked out titles and saw War and Remembrance, the classic long-winded 12-part mini series about WW II starring Robert Mitchum (!) that aired in 1988. I had watched it when it premiered and had never seen it again…and…well, it would remain that way.

Mini series…they call them streaming shows today and yet they move much slower than the slogs from 40 years ago.

I will say, though, I wouldn’t mind seeing Rachel Ward in The Thorn Birds again. That voice, you know, and the way she seduced Richard Chamberlain, the tortured and horny Catholic priest.

My friend chatted up the owner and he was an excellent chatterer. I perused the stock. That took precisely one minute, including the time I checked out the wares in the back room. About the only thing of interest was a black and white photograph of Kurt Cobain smoking a cigarette hanging crookedly on a wall.

Poor Kurt. I always get a pang when I see a picture of him or hear his music. All he had to do was give it all up and move back to his hometown of Aberdeen, a place that still won’t name a street for him because he blew his head off with a shotgun. I think he might sort of like their longstanding, reactionary enmity. There’s certainly a punk rock song in it.

The genesis story of Nifty Thrifty emerged from my friend’s chatting with the owner. It was a bit difficult to follow and I apologize to the owner if I got something wrong. It went like something like this: the man, his wife and two kids were transplants from the Midwest. The couple had served as elderly caregivers and somehow made their way to Bandon. They had been taking care of a man in this home and he’d passed away and willed them the house. Now, it served as a kind or residential care facility for several elderly people who were living upstairs of the thrift shop. His wife had contracted cancer and it looked bad until they began juicing from the cherry trees outside the house and she was cured. He said angels were looking out for his family and that he’d rather be “intelligent than educated.” Neither he nor his wife were masked or mentioned the pandemic. The thrift store was their hobby and passion and they had plans to expand the store.

If you never leave the road always taken, you never walk into interesting stories or better yet, become part of a story yourself. That is especially true at Christmas.

Jesus! I had to buy something! It was Nifty Thrifty’s opening day! Christmas was coming. I was standing inside a couple’s passion and hobby. My friend was striking out finding anything to purchase. We had to rally!

My eyes landed on a nicked-up nerf football. It cost a buck. I’d buy it for the dog. He’d shred it like the Republican members of Congress shred the poor working class every legislative session—that meant savagely and in total bliss.

The man was overjoyed at the purchase. My friend and I left the store to his cries of Merry Christmas. Back in the vehicle, we nearly died of fart asphyxiation, but the dog dug the toy. We drove away to the crooning of Mel Torme or Doris Day and wondered what the hell had just gone down. It all felt like a kind of Christmas Carol meets Peanuts Christmas Special meets Gift of the Magi meets It’s a Wonderful Life holiday tale on the Southern Oregon Coast and we somehow had passed a mysterious test of humanity and everything, for the moment, would work out just fine.

Note to self: Next time through Bandon, be sure to bring several boxes of high end items for Nifty Thrifty.)