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Kooky and Pooky roaming the wild. |
Okay. So what adventures can two identical purple plush elephants possibly have?
Well it all began a few short months ago...
While thrifting in a nearby
Second Ave, a virtual thrift warehouse, I found myself digging through a gigantic bin of affordably priced dolls and stuffed animals.
I am usually hunting for 80’s nostalgic toys from my childhood.
Rainbow Brite, Popples, Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake memorabilia frequent my thrift wish list. But more often than not I find an army of teddy bears and knotty haired, naked Barbies.
Now and again, I’ll find a stuffed animal too cute to resist. This particular occasion it was a crazy-eyed purple elephant with big, droopy ears. He was sort of...strange looking. So I decided to adopt him. I paid the 99 cents, took him home and named him Kooky.
A few months later, after we had the wild idea of starting a blog all about thrifting,
Joe and I ventured on our first road trip. And wouldn’t you know, sitting on the shelf of a Buck’s County Goodwill in a plastic grab bag was yet another crazy-eyed purple elephant with big droopy ears! So for another 99 cents I nabbed the identical purple pachyderm and two other toys.
I have no doubt that diehard thrifters have experienced thrift déjà vu, where repeat goods seem to appear at every thrift. But this anomaly, like multiple copies of
Herb Alpert are often times due to previous popularity. They
were popular and now not, so they’re donated en masse. Or perhaps you’ve seen the same kitchen clock, new in box at multiple Goodwill stores? That is typically due to item donations from retailers such as Target or Wal-Mart. That much makes sense.
But what are the odds that two identical elephants, both of which are in lightly played-with condition, were in two different thrift stores some thirty miles away?
That’s what I like to call thrift karma, folks. A topic which I plan to discuss at length in future blog posts, thrift karma is my personal belief that sometimes we just don’t stumble into good finds. Sometimes those items seem to just find us.
Or in this case, like items find each other.
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Kooky (left) and Pooky (right) are reunited and it feels so good. |
Maybe some of you would care to share some sort of your thrift déjà vu?