Get Out Your Handkerchiefs

This blog has a simple, sad premise: I regret everything, at least as everything pertains to shopping. I suffer from the opposite of buyer’s remorse and mourn, instead, all the pretty ones that got away. Most of what I did not acquire falls into the category of interior decoration—the willful expressions of self that make themselves known in the souls of objects, those objects now inhabited by smarter shoppers’ souls. Revealingly, as age creeps up, I no longer regret careers I didn’t have or stocks I didn’t buy (well, I do have some lingering angst about eBay. And maybe Gucci.). Occasionally I’m sorry my parents didn’t speak to me in French or Chinese, but I suppose I’m lucky they talked to me at all. Knowing how to breathe while swimming, or how to distinguish a gas pedal from a brake—well, either of these would have been kind of nice. With one or the other I could have circumnavigated the globe. Which I have not. Why travel when there’s so much to miss right in my own backyard? (There are two exceptions to this blinder-ed view of bungled shopping; more later on these global lapses.)

The non-purchase that toppled me over the edge and into the vertiginous blogosphere? A large, folding painted screen, signed by the French illustrator Vertès, one-of-a-kind, collectible and priced obscenely low by the smocked volunteers of a Second Avenue thrift shop. Days later, haunted by this find, I went back and, unbelievably, it was still there. However—with two large folding screens (mirrored; vintage wallpapered) spreading their ample girths around the corners of our small apartment, my husband suggested yet another set of hinged planks was, well, a bit beyond unwelcome. And so I passed on Vertès, even though I knew who he was, even though his screen was beautiful, even though we could pay for it without blinking an eye. And then, this week, Elle Décor arrived. Inside, one heck of a gorgeous apartment, belonging to Geoffrey Beene buff Amy Fine Collins. By now you know what lit up, delectably, the corner of her bedroom, what made the room.

Who bought it for her? Beene-bedecked, does she graze the whiff-y Second Avenue thrifts on her way to Vogue? Does her decorator—Robert Couturier (great seam-y name)—do her picking for her? Never mind. This is neither here nor there, just a speculating rest-stop along my labyrinthine descent to regret.
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This is enough for today. Another time I will tell you about the global lapses (hint—they were Parisian, and one was, technically, drinkable and not decorative at all.)