At Village Thrift, looking for frames, I come upon a boxed jigsaw puzzle that catches my eye. It’s a two-sided job. One side is a small town with lots of people and activity, kind of poor man’s Richard Scarry-style. The other is a police lineup with the townsfolk attacking the suspects with tomatoes, a rake, a bicycle wheel, and a purse that looks more like a turkey due to poor draftsmanship. The label says Grand Theft Auto but it looks nothing like the popular video game. It’s $5 so I buy it.

I tell K about it and she’s as baffled as me. We assemble it the next time she’s over. Now it hangs in the bathroom, perp lineup side out. Almost all the decor in there is from thrift stores—couple paint-by-numbers, some embroideries, an old print, a silly vintage PSA illo about wiping your ass.

I float the idea of going to estate sales sometime. A half hour later we’ve got a list of stops in a rough loop around Chicagoland and I’ve booked a car from Hertz for the next day.

The first stop is a very yuppie Lakeview house, the second, a gay couple’s pop-culture-filled treasure trove, the third, a Glenview home overrun by aggressive suburban bargain hunters. Each one a little microcosm. We don’t feel like we belong in any of them.

It’s not till the fourth place that we get our sealegs. I swipe a “Papa’s Lounge” matchbook from the old Polish house for K. At our next stop she takes a little chef pig fridge magnet in return. She scores a wool winter coat while I only find a couple pieces of silverware and a decorative gravy fat separator.

We eat a late lunch at the Red Apple Polish buffet way up Milwaukee. I feel very old complaining about how much their prices have gone up, recalling for the millionth time how I could eat five plates when I was in art school and that it cost $7. That was a long time ago. Two plates is pushing it now, even at $35 a pop.

The Hertz receipt says we traveled a hundred miles. Six sales and several suburbs. A lot of it was going back and forth on Harlem Avenue. Going into strangers’ houses is worthwhile, even if I didn’t find much. It’s a window into how others have lived and, at this point, I make a conscious effort not to buy things. It’s more amateur anthropology. Even though the occupants are very recently deceased or just moving, there’s a palpable sense of death in these dwellings.

Whatever we buy or swipe from these houses brings a trace of loss into our own lives.

You can now buy art from The Sound and the Fury or Winesburg, Ohio even though the books won’t be out till next year.

Speaking of stealing, I very much enjoyed Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, though thievery’s not really what it’s about.