The Collector’s Dilemma
A generous gift leads to an existential crisis. Plus a new Inconspicuous News Roundup!
If you spend a lot of time at vintage shops, flea markets, and other retro-minded outlets, you’re probably familiar with the set of colored Pyrex bowls shown above. At one point they were mainstream items (the Pyrex folks themselves once referred to these bowls as the “world’s most famous mixing-bowl set”), but nowadays they’re popular among fans of midcentury kitchenware, in part because of their saturated decorator colors and in part because the four of them nest together to form a very satisfying collection:
As a fan of midcentury design and collections, I’ve long admired these vintage Pyrex bowls. I even have an old print ad for them framed and displayed in my kitchen:
But despite my fondness for the bowls, and despite seeing them countless times over the years in various shops and on eBay, I never purchased them. Why? For starters, they’re not cheap (a full set usually goes for at least $100, and often considerably more). But maybe more to the point, I already had a few bowls — nondescript but functional — and didn’t need any more.
A couple of years ago, however, I saw that someone in my local Buy Nothing group was giving away two of the bowls from the Pyrex set — the yellow and the green. I still didn’t need more bowls, but I couldn’t turn down the chance to own these two, so I claimed them.
Soon after I published that Facebook post, my friend Liz (the same one who recently told us about the oddly growth-stunted Stop sign in Indiana) got in touch to tell me that she had an extra of the blue bowl and would be happy to give it to me the next time we hung out. But it turned out that we didn’t hang out for a while, so I forgot about her generous offer.
Meanwhile, I had fun adding the yellow and green bowls to my kitchen rotation. Even though they represented only half of the four-bowl set, that didn’t bother me. I was happy to have just these two, especially since green/yellow is one of my favorite color combinations.
Then, about a month ago, I had breakfast with Liz. We’d seen each other at music shows and a few other group settings over the two-plus years since I’d acquired the bowls, but this was the first time since then that we’d made a point of hanging out, just the two of us. True to her word, she brought the blue bowl and gave it to me. I was blown away — I had forgotten about the whole thing.
So I took the blue bowl home and added it to my set, which now looks like this, with only the red bowl missing:
But here’s the thing: It turns out, paradoxically, that having three of the four bowls is much less satisfying than having just two of them. The two bowls were just, well, two bowls, but the three-bowl grouping is close enough to the complete set that it feels annoyingly incomplete, like a word with a missing letter, or a song that stops just before the final, resolving note.