Recycling

In the olden days, Fiorella's thrifty mother did a lot of mail-order shopping from Sears, Roebuck. Just before Christmas, several big, bulky packages would arrive which Brother and Fio were not allowed to see unwrapped.

Then Sears built a store in town and there were no more mail orders. In fact, catalog sales were dying out all over the country.

Only to rise again. But the catalogs are different now because ours is an age of excess. Clothes and shoes and books don't do for gifts these days because we are all well-stocked. Which means we must now peruse specialty catalogs for the new, the different, the unusual--the useless.

Uhm--Brother, whatever happened to that giant inflated version of Munch's "The Scream" that Fio gave you a couple of years ago?