Sat., June 5, 1999This Entry Best Read By
- march 13, 2003 -
For Maximum Freshness
Today was a different sort of day for me. It began as a chilly cakewalk in the park and ended up a Bataan Death March through a wholesale Sahara.
But then, that's the way most Garage Sale days have been for me....As near as I can remember, this is the seventh Garage Sale day I've had in my life. I mean as a seller, of course - not as a buyer. I've had many more as a buyer, the most memorable occurring way back in 1971 when I found a type of lava lamp at an old woman's sale and hesitated to ask about it at first for fear that the thing had some mysterious connection with feminine hygiene. Turns out it did not, and so became one of my most prized possessions. It remains so to this day - which perhaps tells you better what kind of day it's been than I myself ever can.
As a seller I've left a slime trail of my possessions from the town square of Sidney, Ohio to a Kroger's parking lot in Dayton, to Historic Lyme Village in Bellevue, Ohio, to the residence of my in-laws near Cedar Point - one of the biggest amusement parks in the American Midwest. And as good as all this looks here, it looks even better on my professionally typeset résumé.
Today's sale was the first one I've ever been part of which occurred within sight of my home. In fact, it was held in conjunction with my neighbors at their home immediately to my east. I realize that this constitutes high risk behavior in need of much counseling and probably animal tranquilizers, given the kind of stuff I try to stick people with, but I really couldn't help it. My inner wild man simply forced me to once again spend a day living on the edge. If these people are tempted to come back and torch my neighbor's home in their disappointment, anger, and outrage, resulting in my sleep tonight being disturbed by the sound of sirens or my day tomorrow being marred by the sight of cinders on my rose bush, well, too late now to do anything much about it except don sunglasses and turn up the TV....Our sale ran from 8 am until 4 pm, even though the ad in the paper said that it would run "from 8 am until ??" and left me believing for the first hour or so that it might end at any moment. "It all depends upon what sort of time NASA satellites determine '??' to actually be," my wife assured me. I was betting that those government satellites would be making something up by noon just so they could quit and go home, especially since it was a Saturday. I now suspect that my wife knew all along that they wouldn't be microwaving the secret data to her head until four but faked ignorance just to keep me working....
You'd think I'd remember her wily ways by now.Surprisingly, I'd started off really psyched for the sale. I'd chanced to come across the film version of "Patton" last night on TNT (the Ted's last Name is Turner cable network) and so had the most marvelous dreams in which my wife and neighbors responded crisply and clearly to my expertly barked commands. What a shock it was then when all three of them vehemently refused to slap the first so-called male bargain seeker who pretended to be afraid of all our wares and fled screaming back to his car.
Next time I, too, shall maintain the respect of my troops by arriving in a tank with a pearl-handled pistol in one hand and a white pit bull in the other....Not that the day was an entire loss. My female neighbor (RKO) accidentally stepped on my pet ant, Fred, whose worsening incontinence I now realize had been demanding such action for some time now, while my male neighbor (JO) speedily assisted in the removal of my unsold items from his property the very moment the sale was at an end. Indeed, he continues to throw these goods over the fence even as I write this, proving once and for all that the death of the American work ethic really has been greatly exaggerated.
In addition, we also got to meet some of our new neighbors from down the street, who made just the right first impression by telling us the sort of witty and charming stories guaranteed to distract us from the memory of the carloads of people who'd called us good for nothing Okies as we'd carted our wares along the road in a stolen wheelbarrow just hours before.And then of course there were those small, unplanned moments that just made me glad to be a live captain of commerce and not a dead ringer for a pigeon:
My actually selling the 1200-watt space heater I'd purchased in the belief that it would actually heat my garage all winter but turned out to be less capable of the task than an average, hand-held hairdryer.
My actually selling my poor old Toro weed whacker, the now-unrechargeable battery of which barely has the power anymore to muss up a corsage.
My almost-successful attempt at selling my anchor cable to a shy Mennonite girl for use as a modest sort of string bikini.
The exquisite irony of my selling my set of three-pound hand weights to a high school football player who then asked me to carry them to his car for him.
My cinching the sale of my old phone to a skeptical man with the words, "If it doesn't work, just give me a call and I'll make it right."
And then of course there was the fun little contest I had with my wife.
Each time someone came and refused to buy her old bike for $60, she lowered the price five bucks.
Each time someone came and refused to buy my old mower for $10, however, I doubled my asking price.
Turned out that, exactly as I'd predicted, she could no more give her bike away for nothing than I could sell my mower for $15,000.
Am I good, or what?In the end, though, the steadily increasing heat and my failure to sell a single soul on even one of my least-cracked opinions did me in.
We only made about $60 in profit.
Our neighbors only made about the same.
And someone else just last year made $3,000,000 handling one of Mark McGwire's balls while I couldn't even get one person to so much as glance at both of mine for a nickel.
It was that kind of day, but it's over now.
Well, except for the sirens and the cinders.
And the muffled sounds of my collection of shrunken heads coming over the fence, one by one by one....
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(All Material Really & Truly ©1999 by Dan Birtcher even though he'll deny it in court)
