May. 15, 2002 - 21:37 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

Garage Sale

Seldom do I pass a yard sale or garage sale with out stopping to take a look. Treasure hunting at the five and dime. Looking for five dollars worth for quarters. Usually there are some books offered and somtimes I find one which has eluded me or one that piques my intense interest. There are other things to be bought too. Once in a while something I bought for a song thinking it was a bargain turns into a complex misadventure and shows just why those folks wanted to sell it.

But the tail of the coin shows up in me trying to help get ready to put some of our stuff into our apartment complex yard sale on this Saturday. First off everything must come off every shelf, out of every closet and be piled up in the middle of our apartment. This time I forgot to grow grape vines to swing around on so it has been a process of step, stumble and fall all day. Putting stuff into teetering piles of of keep or sell stuff.

This operation is strangely unsettling to me, all of our stuff scattered about preventing freedom of movement and keeping us from even fixing a meal. Can't take too long and dally about on the meal time so during the gathering of garbage I get so Dennyfied that my psyche does weird things to my stomach.

Along about the second day of possession Bedlam I become a zombie-like creature, responding to instructions from others but moving in a mental vacuum. Do I want to be here in the mid-point of the jumbled joint ? I usually answer myself by saying, "No, but there is nowhere else to call home." I get a forlorn feeling when the apartment is in an uproarious state of possessive disarray. So for each movement, each decision arrived at after heavy discussion, and mind changes I can only tell myself that, "This just can't last forever - - - or can it ?"

Then early on the day of the sale shlepping our stuff over to the parking lot in a grocery cart or two and arranging it in as attractive a manner as possible and being pooped just from that. Realizing that one hell of a long day of boring dealing, answering dingbat questions and someone trying to haggle me down from a nickle to a penny is not a pleasant prospect at all. Then along about three in the afternoon I mentally inventory what will possibly remain in our unsold lot, the stuff that no one is possibly interested enough to even look at is un-nerving.

Of course Heather and I have cruised other folks stuff and have found a bargain (we think) to buy and shlep over to the apartment before some one else latches on to it. Finally before dark the grocery buggies are recovered to load the stuff not sold back to the apartment and try to figure out where to put it. After much debate we decide what to take to Goodwill. Some of the stuff we realize should have been put in the trash instead of in the sale and finally throw the darn stuff out.

Funny thing, I have never seen a yard sold at a yard sale nor a garage sold at a Garage Sale . . . . . . . . .

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