Pat’s Blue Light Specials

My mamma & her bargains

My mamma was an expert bargain shopper. I don’t know, because I never asked, but I imagine it started as the fourth of six kids in a family that migrated from Oklahoma to New Mexico in search of work in the 1940s. She was a very young bride and mother who had four girls by the age of 25.

As a pre-teen I remember her making most of my clothes herself or occasionally ordering something from the Sears or Montgomery Ward catalogs. I started ironing the uniforms of her best friend’s husband to make my own money around age 12. I also made and sold potholders (remember those potholder kits with fabric loops?). I always wanted to make my own money so I could pick my own stuff. But I remember particular dresses she made (before girls could wear pants to school) such as the red paisley empire-waisted, bell-sleeved dress and the yellow gingham one from the same Butterick pattern. I loved them. Mamma was thrifty and she knew how to stretch a dollar. We always had a huge garden and she spent many hours cleaning, blanching, and freezing the vegetables we grew, in addition to always having a job outside the home and raising her girls.

If this sounds like a different world, it was.

In later life, after I’d moved to New Orleans, we would go to thrift shops here and in Mississippi because we both loved a hunt and a bargain. She liked clothes and home goods, especially sheets. I liked books, glassware, and the random framed print. She was known to buy all kinds of things for her girls and friends that she thought they needed. She was known to buy things that she didn’t need because it was a bargain - how could she pass it up? Her reputation as a bargain hunter was set in stone.

In Mississippi there were stores called Dirt Cheap that sold “seconds” and other kinds of slightly damaged goods and overstocks. And yes everything in it was dirt cheap. Shopping there was an adventure because at any given time you could find anything, anything at all. As I type this I did a Google and found out all the Dirt Cheap stores closed in October 2024 and the company filed for bankruptcy. So now there are only memories left of our DC forays, just like there is only the memory of my mamma. Oh, but what a powerful memory!

This is a poem I wrote about mamma and DC back in 2017 that was published in Muddy River Poetry Review, in a different form.

Dirt Cheap Queen

It was the hunt that you loved, your laser blue eyes scoping the goods as you entered the store, linens beckoning like flags in the Sun's stare, sheets with innumerable thread counts, only the softest would do. You'd dig through the pile, mining for the gold. You saw the potential in the unwanted, the refused, the flawed, just as you did in people - finding the nuggets in a craggy crowd. Later, you'd wash the rescued, fold them into perfect squares, rest them in the cool of the linen closet as flawless as you knew they could be and, in return, they enveloped you in cushy contentment for the rest of your life.

*

Hug your mamma!