[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Sari Wilson, has ended. Original price: $3. Final price: $31.]

It’s incongruous. The buttery finish, the fluted spout, the air hole in the back of its head offering a peek into its ceramic innards, a glimpse of the thick cream that no one is supposed to have anymore. The torso pitched forward, the nubs of wings lifting, ready to employ itself in the service of our morning coffee. Except that neither of us drank coffee. No matter. We kept that creamer on our table for years. When we did start drinking coffee, we bought it at Starbucks in tall cups and we didn’t even take milk in it.

Where did the creamer come from? Neither of us could remember. Maybe one of those estate sales we sometimes drove out to on Saturdays? For whatever reason, we adopted it. A Balinese sarong covered our rickety table. Then a Crate and Barrel linen cloth. Then we bought a new fancy table—an eight-seater, tavern-style.

Through all those years—our ambitious, job-hopping 20s—the creamer was like a mascot. When we were both promoted to V.P., we bought it a general’s cap. We put sake in it. We treated it with the scornful irony we began to feel for each other. The creamer sat there,  this patient, eyeless homunculus, watching us as we began to argue about stupid things like who would take out the garbage, how much to tip the delivery man, then louder and more forcefully, about real-like stuff. What we wanted. The future. It turned out that I was a Republican and wanted a bunch of kids. He was a Democrat and didn’t want any. One night he grabbed the penguin creamer off the table and said, “What the hell is this?” As if he’d never seen it before. I almost said, “It’s our baby.”

When I moved out I took that orphaned creamer but left everything else. It sits on the red-checked oilcloth covering my bistro table. My new boyfriend pours cream from its spout and says, “Cute little guy.”

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Todd Pruzan, has ended. Original price: $2.99. Final price: $14.50.]

The worst thing is: he sees the golf-ball bank two, maybe three full minutes before it breaks his nose. It’s sitting right there on the table, in full view of the whole room, next to a tiny recorder. This is 1980, and he’s never seen a recorder so small, except maybe in a James Bond movie. There are dozens of cameras in the room, but the photographers who will be craning for a shot of it just a few minutes from now, something to get out to the wires before five o’clock, aren’t paying the slightest attention to it. But oh, they will.

The woman who’s about to wing the golf-ball bank at the senator’s face is brandishing it with comic menace. She’s running her finger along the red laces, tracing the ball’s dimples. The senator is answering a question, but he’s thinking about the golf-ball bank, trying to figure it out. Let’s see: banking subcommittee, bill protecting The American People, he’s out playing the 18th hole at Burning Tree when he should be voting on it, hey, sorry, welcome to Washington.

So what the hell: he just calls on her. Young lady, with that golf-ball bank with the tennis shoes. Heads turn her way. Deadpan aside into the bank of live mics: You look like maybe you’re wantin’ to throw that thing at me. Chuckles from the other reporters — and then she just does it. She really does it. She stands and picks it up and throws the bank at him, hard — not at all like a girl, he’ll remember later — and nobody reacts, because it’s too fast, and then it’s flying and getting bigger and bigger until it breaks his nose, and finally, everyone gasps and shouts. The senator screams at an octave nobody realized he could reach, including himself. The audio will be replayed for months at inopportune moments on Saturday Night Live. Years after the general public has stopped recognizing it, a DJ in the Bronx will unearth the audio and turn the scream into a popular hip-hop sample.

The golf-ball bank hits the lectern first, then lands on the floor, on its feet. Two secret-service guards lunge for it, as though they really think it might run away, and clunk heads, hard. There’s a scrum of arms around the woman, who’s got straight blonde hair and enormous tinted glasses. Her chant, whatever it is, fades as she’s pulled further away from the front of the chamber. One of the guards, without thinking, hands the golf-ball bank to the senator. He probably thinks the senator dropped it. The golf-ball bank is unbroken, and there’s no blood.

The next morning, the New York Post is first out of the gate: FORE SCORE! One of his friends shows up at his Georgetown house with a copy of the paper. The senator signs: Craig — only 17 holes to go! Best wishes. The friend has a favor. He’s got a nonprofit doing a silent auction that Saturday. Can they auction off the golf-ball bank. A piece of Washingtoniana, a piece of Congressional history. It’s for a children’s hospital. All yours, says the senator, and hands it over.

The winning bid on the golf-ball bank gets raucous cheers — it gets as much as a pair of season tickets to the Redskins. The bank then sits on a coffee table for four years. Then the family moves, and it sits in a box for more than two decades, until the youngest son is in college and finds it in the attic when he’s looking for old VHS tapes. He mutters: No way.

The protester is retired now. She rarely does interviews, but when she does, she gets fired up again about the banking bill. It still gets to her. She doesn’t regret the 72 months in jail. She’s glad she did it.

The senator’s legacy isn’t in banking law but in Congressional security. Just try bringing a walking golf-ball bank into the Capitol Building today: you’re liable to spend a few hours explaining yourself to stern-looking police officers before they let you go. (You’re probably not really going to pull anything, they’ll decide, finally. Probably not worth our trouble.) Sir: We’re going to let you go, but you can’t be bringing that in here. Leave that bank at home.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by James Parker, has closed. Original price: $1.25. Final price: $15.53 ]

“You know, of course,” said the periodontist, as he bore down with his scalpel, “that Nancy Pelosi is insane?”

Floyd Haruspex, gaping and nearly prone in the chair, made no answer. The question had been rhetorical anyway.

“She is, excuse me, batshit crazy… Any pain?”

“Ngh-ngh,” answered Floyd, emphatically. Halfway through this operation to fix his receding gums and he was feeling no pain at all. The left side of his mouth and face had in fact become a miraculous region of pure psychology. No sensations, only… impressions, intuitions, insights. Ah, Novocain.

“Let me know,” said the periodontist, whose name was Dr. Soundgarden.

But now Floyd like a saint was gazing beyond this earthly scene, gazing over Dr. Soundgarden’s meaty white-clad shoulder and out through the window. Rainy ocean sky. Undifferentiated sub-glare. A vast range of numbness. Somewhere out there was Diagnostic Jones with his pack of Harley-riding Illuminati, all pushing their hogs through the last frontier of mechanical endurance en route to the big kahuna, the king burrito, the cosmic giggle-osaurus. And Prima Materia, alchemical sex-siren. Tying one on in some cheesy maritime bar no doubt, with several new friends of the fishing or dope-running persuasion. Would he, Floyd, ever get the chance to dissolve and coagulate with her — to produce with her the philosopher’s stone? Yeah, right.

“What’s happening with this country right now, I’d like to go to sleep for ten years.” Dr. Soundgarden was talking again, while his hands in their bloodied plastic gloves made squinching sounds in Floyd’s mouth. “Sleep for ten years, wake up, maybe things’d be back to normal. Know what I’m saying?”

Floyd inclined an eyebrow à la Errol Flynn. He was at the shoreline, and some sort of John Bircher was fixing his gumline. Karma was a pretzel sometimes. And he hadn’t even begun to think about the kitty plate. Why had someone left it in his car last night, this little milk-saucer with the face of a cat painted on it? He had floundered heavily into the driver’s seat, with the bar-reek on him, to find it propped on the dashboard like a rebuke. The cat was ginger-ish, with a distant, unreadable expression. “And the same to you, partner,” Floyd had mumbled, tossing it onto the back seat and scraping at the ignition. He’d never owned a cat. He didn’t like cats. Which was not to say that he didn’t understand the cat thing: he knew any number of ex-radicals and tired misanthropes whose single connection to the world-as-commonly-experienced was via some sullen feline. Barney Breaks, for example, the P.I. he’d hired to spy on his first wife. Pissed-off to the core. A disenchantment with humanity that was truly cosmic. Now there was a cat guy.

Could it have been Barney who left the kitty plate in Floyd’s ’66 Chevy Impala? As a message that his darkest apprehensions re: Prima Materia were about to be realized?

But Barney had joined a cult three years ago: the Joy People, out of Humboldt County. Never been heard of since, poor bastard.

Besides, the cat on the plate wasn’t giving a message. If anything, he was withholding a message. That’s what cats did, right? Unlike everything else, they refused to signify. And Floyd, in the periodontist’s chair, began to shake with unphraseable laughter.

[Bidding on this Significant Object, with story by Annie Nocenti, has ended. Original price: $2.99. Final price: $26.]

I’m long off the vine. Eighty, truth be told. I refuse to be one of those biddies that dies with clutter. Found drooling in a wing-back, her thousand-strong frog collection eyeballing her. My clutter is for sale. I was a housewife in the Fifties, so there were various disappointments, which led to… various remedies. But that kind of clutter is not up for sale, and certainly not worth the price.

Let me see here… Salt Lick JFK. When I was thirty and Edith was eight, we’d go into the department store, and she’d rush up and down the aisles licking everything that took her fancy. She was a terrible embarrassment to me. I’d dig my fingernails into her until her arm glowed with a row of red crescent moons. But that little tumbleweed would twist out of my grip and be off licking a ceramic gnome or Easter egg or whatnot. I took her to the doctor and he said it was a “compulsion” she’d grow out of. She didn’t, but that’s another story.

One day Edith licked JFK and said, “It doesn’t need salt.” Turns out she had good taste. Most of the junk Edith licked turned out to be collectibles. Those pre-assassination JFK Salt Lick heads went on to be very popular after ’63. We used the head for a school report. Turns out salt licks are cosmic, from some divine cow of Norse mythology descended from one-eyed Odin. Salt licks have a certain… resurrection quality, not that that helped poor JFK. Cows quite like them. I can’t promise this one is unadulterated. But it’s got history.