My Garage Sale

So I had my garage sale this past weekend. My first ever garage sale. Also most likely my last. I can’t believe how much work having a garage sale is. And considering that most of my junk was already in the garage I didn’t have to haul stuff in and out of the house.

I used to own a shop and so I thought I knew what I was doing. Wrong. The people who come to garage sales are a different breed. They are looking for bargains and when they don’t see one they aren’t afraid to demand one. I was not selling junk, really, this should have been an estate sale, but I was not going to haul all of it inside the house for the sake of semantics.

I had an old milk carton box full of old records. Vinyl records, the kind that have to played on a record player. They were my records from when I was a teenager so there was a lot of Shaun Cassidy, Billy Squire, Styx, Van Halen and a fair amount of Carpenters, Captain and Tenille, and for some reason I can’t account for a lot of Barry Manilow. Yes, I grew up in the late 70’s early 80’s. I listened to pop music. I am not proud of my record collection and that is why it has sat in my garage with little concern for the care of the dust jackets. When I pulled them out to mark them at a quarter a piece I noticed they were all stuck together on the bottom. My garage floods in the spring time and these albums have been through at least three spring floods. I pulled the albums apart and put them on display. I really didn’t think anyone would be interested in them even if they were in mint condition. I have about five albums left out of 65. Most of the people who bought the albums were in their early twenties. I don’t know why they are interested in bad pop from the 70’s and 80’s but my records were a hit and no one made fun of my love for Shaun Cassidy, in fact I heard from many women my age that they too were planning on marrying him when they were younger.

I was amazed at how some people dressed to go garage sailing. One woman who couldn’t have been much older that her early 20’s came dressed in a pair of hip hugger jeans that were revealing to say the last. These jeans were not manufactured as hip huggers but as my neighbor so eloquently put it “when you stuff 50 lbs of flour in a 5lb bag there tends to be a little spillover.” For the life of me I don’t know how this woman walked. Ever time she bent to look at something I had this insane desire to place quarters in the slot that kept appearing. I couldn’t stop staring at her or her boyfriend who looked normal.

Another woman arrived who for all intents and purposes looked like you and me. Except she had bones in her ears. Not like Wilma Flintstones but actual dog bones, the kind used to clean dogs teeth, Dent-a-bones. I should have asked why she had dog bones in her ears but I wasn’t raised to point out the obvious stupidity in people, at least not to their faces. I’m sure she would have been happy to tell me, one doesn’t put dog bones, and large ones at that in their earlobes unless they want to have people ask them about it.

I did OK on the sale, I still have a fair amount of stuff to get rid of but it’s the kind of stuff that is worth it to put on eBay. I hate eBay but I need to get rid of this stuff and it is too valuable to just give to the Goodwill. So I have that to look forward to…eBay.

When I was finished with the sale I closed up the garage, locked it and brought my daughter with me to Sam’s Club, cause I guess I hadn’t gotten my fix of freaks for the day.