I Found Treasures and a Husband in a Thrift Store, in Varying Levels of Pre-Loved Conditions

Why I love thrifting as much in my forties as I did as a teenager

Some of Sara Knight Bidlack’s treasures from decades of thrifting

Ninth grade is painful on a good day, but when you’re that special kind of weird which idolizes a nostalgia during which you never actually lived, the loneliness is even worse. Or at least that’s how I felt as a high school freshman at the turn of the millennium.

When all my friends were listening to NSYNC and Britney Spears—not that there’s anything wrong with that—I was knee-deep in the historical treasure trove of The Beatles and Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. I loved that I loved what I loved, but I hated that I had no one to share my obsessions with. It was a lonely practice to want to have someone to debate the merits of Paul versus John (it’s always Paul, for the record), but no one was speaking my language, and I certainly wasn’t speaking theirs, either.

Then I met my best friend’s boyfriend, Phil. He was a year older than me and witty, funny like me. Phil was obsessed with The Doors; he was a fellow stranger in the strange land of wrong timing. And he could drive.

Phil and I spent many afternoons of the early aughts picking through thrift stores. Phil hunted for pants which might make him look like a skosh of a hair of a reverie of an inkling of The Lizard King himself—Jim Morrison—and I liked to pick through the dirty costume jewelry, imagining what the rhinestones might shine back up to be. We flicked through yellowed paperback classics, their pages crusted with neglect and margins scratched with lead. We poked through ancient china collections, the metallic rims worn down from washing. And we pilfered through vinyl record stacks, inspecting the quality of their grooves in the light.

We imagined ourselves to be connoisseurs of items from eras in which we never lived or breathed, but we imagined so vividly. We talked about our thrifted treasures over endless cups of coffee while Phil chain smoked Camel Lights because you could still smoke in diners. In Phil’s beat up 1991 Mercury Cougar in 2003, we listened to David Bowie because we actually, painstakingly, after much heated debate, agreed on him.

In the early 2000s, we didn’t yet use phones to text message each other, but we knew that the yellow rotary phones we saw laying forsaken in thrift stores were special somehow.

25 years later, Phil and I have been married for a decade. We have two kids who we teach about The Beatles and Bowie and The Doors. Sometimes we take our kids treasure hunting in thrift stores so they can scavenge for bent license plates from different states, which they nail to their bedroom wall as decorations. We live in a house where there’s no phone attached to the wall at all, and we text each other on screens which respond to touch in specific spots on a smooth glass surface. There aren’t even buttons to press down and spring back up again.

The other day I was feeling distant, unlike myself. The pressures of the world and the headlines of the day got to me. With our kids in school for the afternoon and work unnecessary for the moment, I asked Phil if he wanted to go to a thrift store with me.

We wandered through the crystal vases and worn-down shoes. There were rows of orangey wooden cabinets, too boxed-in and restrictive for today’s television screens. In the media section, we flipped through discarded DVDs and fat clammy VHS cases. I picked up a CD case, misplaced music in the movie section, and held it up for Phil to see: It was a Coldplay album from when we were in high school, when I was a sophomore and he was a junior.

“I bought that for you when it came out,” he said and I nodded, knowing what he would say before he said it. It was a relic from a nostalgia we had actually lived through together this time.

And here we are, still living it at 40, looking back and collecting memories and thrifted treasures and dust.

Sara Knight Bidlack is a writer, dreamer, fat girl, and silly person who lives near Atlantic City, New Jersey with her husband and two young children. She earned degrees in creative writing, journalism, and literature, and is currently working on gentle parenting. Her drugs of choice are ice cream, honest human connection, late 90s pop/rock, and Harry Styles. Her Substack is

Sara Knight Bidlack

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