USED GOODIES.(New York City's various thrift and vintage shops explored for treasures)

In my fourteen-year-old son's favorite photograph of me, I am a young woman with a faraway look wearing a black-and-white Ramones T-shirt from the band's 1978 "Rocket to Russia" tour. Last Christmas, he bought an identical shirt from a street vender near St. Mark's Place and gave it to me wrapped in the Style section of the Sunday Times, because, he said, with an irony I suspect was unintended, "newsprint is sterile." I found the fact that he claimed to have haggled on and off for two days with the seller nearly as poignant as his impulse to salvage a Proustian relic of his mother's past. It also pleased me to think that perhaps he hadn't so idly spent his most formative ...