If dealing with religious screwballs hasn’t fully deflated your expectations of mankind, I have the perfect final crushing blow for any optimism you may have retained hiding in the recesses of your mind. It is simple and elegant: hold a yard sale. Nothing is guaranteed to wipe from your heart any final hopeful residue for this species of ours. No, by lunchtime you will be driven half mad with the shuffling parade of people who thought it perfectly appropriate to show their faces to the world wearing flip-flops, ill-fitting track pants, and stained t-shirts bought at a previous yard sale, or too-tight acid-wash jeans with a polka-dot tube top, with scarecrow hair and even scarier, crowier faces: pinched, vulture-eyed, pursed-lipped; pawing, rooting for truffles, hands clutching greasy crumpled wads of cash, scattering your organization and engaging you in rambling batty conversation, mumbling stories about some guy they knew back in 1976 who had a hat just like that, and their mother in the nursing home whose silver pattern was the exact same, and how they used to see Louis Prima play in Vegas, and oh, what was the name of that other guy…. Zzzzz….
And always, always the haggling, even over things priced very well. Someone approached the table of my grandma’s tackiest costume jewelry that no one in the family had wanted after she died, asking, “Don’t you have any real gold jewelry for like, 50 cents?” A tumbleweed then blew down the street and the crickets broke into chorus. No, I said, fingering the tin brooch of a frizzy-headed cartoony woman bearing the legend, “BAD HAIR DAY,” I was afraid we didn’t.
Woman: How much is this vacuum?
Me: $10.
Woman: Would you take $5?
Me: No
Woman: $5?
Me: NO. Ten bucks is fair.
Woman: $5?
Me: Look, if you ask me that again I'm going to kill you with it AND charge you $10, you silly bitch.
OK, that last bit may have been in my head…
The histrionic unshaven man who argued as if presenting a court case over a difference of two dollars for my microwave; the stylish coiffed mavens who adored my vintage tablecloths but wouldn’t buy because they were too miserly; the bastard who bought my old SLR camera and when my back was turned pocketed a separate lens for it that he hadn’t paid for; the clean-cut man who looked sober as a judge while scooping up all of my books on paganism and witchcraft and scurried away almost salaciously with his quarry…we are all equals at a yard sale; the varying strata of society all commingle, wresting plates from one another to check the mark on the bottom, strewing your clothing about like a mid-tizzy Joan Crawford, poking through the old VHS tapes and CDs with disdain or perplexity at your taste, while you try with desperation and inexperience to be a hard-bargaining salesman offering up the detritus of your life, as if it is precious treasure, for a hard-won and always humiliatingly negotiated pittance.
Still, worth every moment for that $128 in ones and dimes. Especially when I came home from the neighboring sales with all kinds of bargains!
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