Monday, July 21, 2003
I have a woman from the Canary Islands to thank for teaching me how to iron correctly and that is a story I would like to tell sometime. But first I'll tell you about my other favorite household chore I like doing, which is going to the dump. Top that with a yard sale the next day and we are talking a cathartic experience. I did both over the weekend. After I finished ironing.
For those who don't know me, I am a diehard agnostic. As Bandit would say, an agnostic is someone just too chicken to be an atheist. A true statement. But I digress. Going to the dump, I've decided, is equivalent to a confessional for agnostics. I've never actually been to Confession but by all accounts, one feels purged and cleansed afterwards, which is exactly what you feel after you've unloaded fourteen years of collective baggage -- heaving it as it were from the back of a borrowed Ford Ranger pick-up truck into a gaping, un-judgmental mouth below.
Few would recognize me when I'm at the dump. First off no one would expect to see me in a grungy dented Ford Ranger pick-up. At least it is not the worst transgressor against the environment, but not exactly a Mini-Cooper either. But what's a liberal, environmentally conscious S.U.V. hater to do when she's got four truckloads of accumulated crap to get rid of?
My friend's truck has matured to a point where looking worn and dilapidated have become character-building and endearing features: the tan seats are a dirt-worn gray; the stick-shift handle spontaneously disengages itself from the "stick" to land in your hand just as you are shifting from first to second gear; and the motor doth protest when you too quickly move it from second to third gear. My hubby commented that I looked like a happy country bumpkin as I coaxed the junk-laden truck towards the town dump Saturday afternoon, and the truth is I was. Well let me qualify that. It's fun to play-act.... Once in a role, however, I take my part seriously. When I backed up the truck and then nimbly jumped up onto the load in back, one would have thought that I came from a long, proud lineage of garbage collectors. Even my can-do-all hubby was impressed as I heaved our irreparably cracked dining room table off the flatbed. I think he got the same rush that I did when the table then thunderously crashed amongst its refuse brethren below. I can see why therapists sometimes send their patients to the dump. Hurling large objects and seeing them break into splinters below is a great way to blow off steam.
I am amazed at the amount of garbage the little town I live in is capable of producing. I am amazed at the amount of garbage I can produce. It is when I multiply my town by X-thousand towns and cities across this country that I become distressed that in spite of the vastness of our country, we cannot possibly absorb or sustain so much waste. Like a little toddler who is fascinated by his potty achievements, I stand spell-bound at the edge of the cavernous town shit hole, as truck load after car load belch forth an unmitigating stream of materialistic residue.
The dump experience is a visceral one. Acrid odors assault the wary nose as the eye tries to make sense, but can't, of a mountain of broken context. Which leads me to my theory why yard sales are so popular... The yard sale brings a sense of continuum back into the equation. What the coffee house is to the European, the yard sale is to the American. It is a comfortable, authentic place where people come together to klatsch: I will tell you the story of what I am selling to you. You will tell me the story of who you are and why you want to buy my junk. Even better we will barter and strike a deal. It makes no difference that I have sold you a silk scarf for .25 cents that once cost me $40.00. I am happy because for .25 cents, someeone now knows the stories I couldn't bare to just throw away into a landfill. You are happy because you have a slightly frayed but beautiful silk scarf that will go nicely with your dress and which you got for almost nothing.
My Yard Sale:
I wake up at 6:30 a.m. on Sunday, make a cup of coffee, and contemplate which male muscles I am going to wake up first to help me move my yard sale fare from the garage out onto the sidewalk. Turns out my daughter is the first to arise and I immediately enlist her former swim-team muscles to start the job. I'm lucky she woke up first. What she lacks in physical strength compared to the eighteen-year-old glob of muscles still asleep upstairs, is more than made up for in her ability to 'know' how I want things arranged. We silently lift junk of different sizes and shapes and arrange them into a most logical order: Two faded worn couches we place in a neat L-Shape configuration -- setting an old teak coffee table in front on which I place my coffee mug and Sunday NY Times. Then we set up an 'office of junk': two old computer monitors on top of a cheapo-computer table surrounded by an array of miscellaneous good-for-nothing office paraphernalia (pencil holders, lamps, discarded answering machines, etc.). The list goes on: the "kitchen" consists of Yuppie has-beens -- a bread machine and pasta maker. Then the sports section: a mish mash of old skis, ski boots, deflated soccer balls and discarded tennis racquets. The master bedroom walk-in-closet consists mostly of my daughter's, God-I couldn't-possibly-wear-that-Abercrombie-outfit-again throw-aways, as well as a few, What-was-I-thinking-when-I bought-that outfits. You get the picture.
Anyway, yard sales do something a visit to the dump can't. When you throw your broken dining room table into a steel pit, NOBODY knows or cares about the stories that went with that table. Like the fact that it was made in Salem, Massachusetts sometime in the late 19th century and that it somehow made its way to an antique shop on the west coast. The fact that hubby and I happened to walk into that little antique store about twenty years ago and bought it for about a hundred dollars. The fact that it moved from one start-up company opportunity to the next until it made its way back to a stone's throw from whence it was born. The fact that it watched a young, struggling family grow, and dream, and fight, and make Thanksgiving dinners. I can't remember how the base of the table broke, but it got replaced by a newer table, and sat for years in the basement. Once someone tried to fix it by gluing the base but it didn't work.
A lot of customers came by my yard sale. The first were an English couple on bicycles (he on a very cool, mint condition 1947 Swiss army bicycle). They bought a broken lamp that they were sure they could repair and which they wanted for their bedroom in the house they were renting for the summer. There were the early-birders who professionally scanned our selection for any Van Gogh paintings we may have ignorantly pulled from our attic and put on sale as "some rubbish painting from Aunt Jules." The neighbors who are renting the house across the street came by. They bought one of our old bikes for one of their kids. The ten-year-old who was the lucky recepient came over to thank me and tell me how great the bike was (you gotta' love kids who haven't been spoiled...). A German couple bought my old Singer sewing machine I got when I was a teenager. She was genuinely excited and I was touched to know that people still sew. There was an elderly woman from Chile and her family who bought ten curtain rods. And there were many more. And as usual, they bought the things I never expected to sell, and left the things I thought would fly off the sidewalk. But whatever they bought, I made sure they took the story that I wanted them to take along with their purchase.
I made about $200. Not bad. I sold a broken lamp, a sewing machine, a teak coffee table, some SAT prep books, a pasta maker, curtain rods, a gold plated brooch, a woven rug, a bicycle, two computer monitors, a computer table, a Gap skirt, some baskets, and various trinket jewelry and knick knacks. The British couple who came back after their bike ride to pick up their lamp had me take a picture of them in front of my junk collection to send back home to their friends. At the end of the day I packed up a few passed-over goodies and gave them to the neighbors across the street. What remained got stuffed back into the garage. I can't imagine why nobody wanted my hand-sponge-painted dresser for $6, and I guess nobody needed an off-white leather couch with a few claw marks from the dog that day either. Maybe the Salvation Army will have better luck with this stuff.
The woman from Chile who bought the curtain rods almost had tears in her eyes when I told her the rods were ten cents a piece. Little did she know that the rods had been sitting up in my attic from the previous owner and so had cost me nothing. I think had I given her the rods, she would not have been nearly as pleased as by the notion that she was getting such a 'great deal." Now there is some social commentary worth talking about..."
For those who don't know me, I am a diehard agnostic. As Bandit would say, an agnostic is someone just too chicken to be an atheist. A true statement. But I digress. Going to the dump, I've decided, is equivalent to a confessional for agnostics. I've never actually been to Confession but by all accounts, one feels purged and cleansed afterwards, which is exactly what you feel after you've unloaded fourteen years of collective baggage -- heaving it as it were from the back of a borrowed Ford Ranger pick-up truck into a gaping, un-judgmental mouth below.
Few would recognize me when I'm at the dump. First off no one would expect to see me in a grungy dented Ford Ranger pick-up. At least it is not the worst transgressor against the environment, but not exactly a Mini-Cooper either. But what's a liberal, environmentally conscious S.U.V. hater to do when she's got four truckloads of accumulated crap to get rid of?
My friend's truck has matured to a point where looking worn and dilapidated have become character-building and endearing features: the tan seats are a dirt-worn gray; the stick-shift handle spontaneously disengages itself from the "stick" to land in your hand just as you are shifting from first to second gear; and the motor doth protest when you too quickly move it from second to third gear. My hubby commented that I looked like a happy country bumpkin as I coaxed the junk-laden truck towards the town dump Saturday afternoon, and the truth is I was. Well let me qualify that. It's fun to play-act.... Once in a role, however, I take my part seriously. When I backed up the truck and then nimbly jumped up onto the load in back, one would have thought that I came from a long, proud lineage of garbage collectors. Even my can-do-all hubby was impressed as I heaved our irreparably cracked dining room table off the flatbed. I think he got the same rush that I did when the table then thunderously crashed amongst its refuse brethren below. I can see why therapists sometimes send their patients to the dump. Hurling large objects and seeing them break into splinters below is a great way to blow off steam.
I am amazed at the amount of garbage the little town I live in is capable of producing. I am amazed at the amount of garbage I can produce. It is when I multiply my town by X-thousand towns and cities across this country that I become distressed that in spite of the vastness of our country, we cannot possibly absorb or sustain so much waste. Like a little toddler who is fascinated by his potty achievements, I stand spell-bound at the edge of the cavernous town shit hole, as truck load after car load belch forth an unmitigating stream of materialistic residue.
The dump experience is a visceral one. Acrid odors assault the wary nose as the eye tries to make sense, but can't, of a mountain of broken context. Which leads me to my theory why yard sales are so popular... The yard sale brings a sense of continuum back into the equation. What the coffee house is to the European, the yard sale is to the American. It is a comfortable, authentic place where people come together to klatsch: I will tell you the story of what I am selling to you. You will tell me the story of who you are and why you want to buy my junk. Even better we will barter and strike a deal. It makes no difference that I have sold you a silk scarf for .25 cents that once cost me $40.00. I am happy because for .25 cents, someeone now knows the stories I couldn't bare to just throw away into a landfill. You are happy because you have a slightly frayed but beautiful silk scarf that will go nicely with your dress and which you got for almost nothing.
My Yard Sale:
I wake up at 6:30 a.m. on Sunday, make a cup of coffee, and contemplate which male muscles I am going to wake up first to help me move my yard sale fare from the garage out onto the sidewalk. Turns out my daughter is the first to arise and I immediately enlist her former swim-team muscles to start the job. I'm lucky she woke up first. What she lacks in physical strength compared to the eighteen-year-old glob of muscles still asleep upstairs, is more than made up for in her ability to 'know' how I want things arranged. We silently lift junk of different sizes and shapes and arrange them into a most logical order: Two faded worn couches we place in a neat L-Shape configuration -- setting an old teak coffee table in front on which I place my coffee mug and Sunday NY Times. Then we set up an 'office of junk': two old computer monitors on top of a cheapo-computer table surrounded by an array of miscellaneous good-for-nothing office paraphernalia (pencil holders, lamps, discarded answering machines, etc.). The list goes on: the "kitchen" consists of Yuppie has-beens -- a bread machine and pasta maker. Then the sports section: a mish mash of old skis, ski boots, deflated soccer balls and discarded tennis racquets. The master bedroom walk-in-closet consists mostly of my daughter's, God-I couldn't-possibly-wear-that-Abercrombie-outfit-again throw-aways, as well as a few, What-was-I-thinking-when-I bought-that outfits. You get the picture.
Anyway, yard sales do something a visit to the dump can't. When you throw your broken dining room table into a steel pit, NOBODY knows or cares about the stories that went with that table. Like the fact that it was made in Salem, Massachusetts sometime in the late 19th century and that it somehow made its way to an antique shop on the west coast. The fact that hubby and I happened to walk into that little antique store about twenty years ago and bought it for about a hundred dollars. The fact that it moved from one start-up company opportunity to the next until it made its way back to a stone's throw from whence it was born. The fact that it watched a young, struggling family grow, and dream, and fight, and make Thanksgiving dinners. I can't remember how the base of the table broke, but it got replaced by a newer table, and sat for years in the basement. Once someone tried to fix it by gluing the base but it didn't work.
A lot of customers came by my yard sale. The first were an English couple on bicycles (he on a very cool, mint condition 1947 Swiss army bicycle). They bought a broken lamp that they were sure they could repair and which they wanted for their bedroom in the house they were renting for the summer. There were the early-birders who professionally scanned our selection for any Van Gogh paintings we may have ignorantly pulled from our attic and put on sale as "some rubbish painting from Aunt Jules." The neighbors who are renting the house across the street came by. They bought one of our old bikes for one of their kids. The ten-year-old who was the lucky recepient came over to thank me and tell me how great the bike was (you gotta' love kids who haven't been spoiled...). A German couple bought my old Singer sewing machine I got when I was a teenager. She was genuinely excited and I was touched to know that people still sew. There was an elderly woman from Chile and her family who bought ten curtain rods. And there were many more. And as usual, they bought the things I never expected to sell, and left the things I thought would fly off the sidewalk. But whatever they bought, I made sure they took the story that I wanted them to take along with their purchase.
I made about $200. Not bad. I sold a broken lamp, a sewing machine, a teak coffee table, some SAT prep books, a pasta maker, curtain rods, a gold plated brooch, a woven rug, a bicycle, two computer monitors, a computer table, a Gap skirt, some baskets, and various trinket jewelry and knick knacks. The British couple who came back after their bike ride to pick up their lamp had me take a picture of them in front of my junk collection to send back home to their friends. At the end of the day I packed up a few passed-over goodies and gave them to the neighbors across the street. What remained got stuffed back into the garage. I can't imagine why nobody wanted my hand-sponge-painted dresser for $6, and I guess nobody needed an off-white leather couch with a few claw marks from the dog that day either. Maybe the Salvation Army will have better luck with this stuff.
The woman from Chile who bought the curtain rods almost had tears in her eyes when I told her the rods were ten cents a piece. Little did she know that the rods had been sitting up in my attic from the previous owner and so had cost me nothing. I think had I given her the rods, she would not have been nearly as pleased as by the notion that she was getting such a 'great deal." Now there is some social commentary worth talking about..."
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