Garage sale
One man’s junk . . .
MORGAN MODJESKI
The garage sale: a place where 50 cents can buy you a lamp or two and anything else you’re willing to bargain for. These open-door sales occur during only one time of year, and they truly are an odd sign of summer. These people have spent the last six months inside their homes, and I guess at one time during their long and arduous hibernation they turn and say to a loved one, “I’ve been sitting in this house looking around and by God’s word we have a lot of shit.” They then follow with, “We have so much shit. Let’s just fucking sell it.”
Like many other people, I enjoy these strange sales, where a man or woman, or maybe a couple of them, sit on their front lawn posing as the raw essence of a cashier. These people probably spent the previous evening in a hopeful haze, applying small price-stickers to a host of unwanted objects.
The items sold at garage sales are pretty much all the same, just the basic junk that their owners don’t find useful anymore. In the one-man business of garage sales, the people who no longer find the objects useful are usually the ones who apply the stickers and set up the small cashier. The sale items usually consist of children toys outgrown by their once-young owners, a few boxes of old books, and often, there is a box or pile tantalizingly labeled “free.”
I once got a box of books for free. There were some gems, but most of it was just weird garbage. It was sad in its way, a whole box of humankind’s most informative tools gone to the dogs, or even worse, the dump. I picked it up for no real reason other than the fact that it was free; and in a way I saved that valuable garbage, but now it sits in my closet, left to become another type of trash.
Selling something at a ridiculously cheap price to a complete stranger is an odd thing to do, especially when the item might hold some sort of value. An even stranger act, I think, is that of buying an object at a ridiculously cheap price from a complete stranger, or even getting it for free. At this very moment I am wearing a “Something Special Van Specialists” shirt that I bought for 75 cents, a bargain I could not resist. Before wearing the shirt, naturally, I washed it, but despite the fact it was purchased at a garage sale, the shirt is in perfect condition.
Even though it’s a nice shirt, I can never avoid the unsettling thought: why did someone sell this in the first place? Is it just useless, or is there a more sinister reason why this shirt is so cheap, the same way a stolen car stereo is sold on the streets for a hurried buck?
I am not sure anyone really knows the reason why people sell their old junk for cheap prices. I suppose it’s more pleasant to sell something and know it’s out in the world doing some good, rather than just rotting away in some dumpster. In a way it’s a great situation: old junk being passed around from person to person, sold or stolen. In a way, these items experience immortality; they never have to face the trash can. Instead they get passed around from person to person, to be sold again when the time is right . . . probably the following summer.
