Even in cronehood there is a special excitement about acquiring clothes. Yesterday, I finally bought the perfect denim jacket, and even on sale 65% off at Macy’s Brooklyn it was not really cheap- not Thrift shop cheap, just comparatively inexpensive. God knows where I’ll wear it- it’s no good for Court, and it’s too nice for turning compost at the garden. But, it goes perfectly with the long denim skirt from National Wholesale Liquidators, hides fat, and well, makes me look ...young. Other than professional clothing, which is necessary, because without a good suit and expensive briefcase no one takes you seriously, it’s a mystery why one continues hunt for that perfect summer top, another shirt dress, or a new evening skirt. A couple of years ago, I walked into the Housing Works thrift shop on East 23rd street and found a green-colored boiled wool cape with large silver double headed eagle buttons and a black crocheted border for 10 dollars. Made in Austria, it is the classic fingertip length style with the extra buttons along the border to secure hand access so the cape doesn’t flap in the wind on a bicycle. This very cape was all the rage 30 years ago when I was a starving singer-student and mother in Heidelberg. All the young women had just such a cape. I would enviously look at the other women at Market in their capes, their hands extended out of the buttoned hand holes and holding little lined market baskets for their groceries, or walking along the Neckar river, pushing prams in their boiled wool capes. I longed for one so badly in those days that I bought some cheap corduroy in Nuremburg on a train stopover to a rehearsal in Bayreuth and made a cape with a matching skirt to wear bike riding in Heidelberg. Now, here was the perfect Cape, thirty years too late, in a New York City thrift shop. If course I instantly bought it, and even occasionally wear it bike riding along the Hudson to the uptown Fairway for groceries. I often wish it could be sent back in time and space, addressed to Jackie Hansen-Bukowski, 6-8 Marz Strasse, Heidelberg 69.