The Garage Sale

You may have noticed that I like to talk about the importance of taking a break, stepping back in order to recover from a hectic schedule, also to allow things to settle in.

This week, my tank is empty, so I’m taking my own advice. Here, a piece from my memoir-in-progress:

From the May 24, 1972 edition of the Paramus [NJ] Post

We set up the tables on Friday night.

Sheets of small white circles hold my mother’s spidery handwriting in Bic pen while mine almost tear through the stickers, a Braille in reverse. I do not tread lightly, whether I’m writing, playing Chopin on the piano, or walking.

Her numbers veer to the right, as if reflecting her hope for a solitary future, while mine are straight up and down. I’m nine years old but dream of escape. I know I’m stuck in this airless house until further notice.

We circle the tables, sticking price tags on everything from pilled afghans to a worn bicycle tube. She focuses on the glassware and knickknacks while I deal with the clothes, toys, and puzzles.

The next morning, after the initial scrum of wild-eyed early birds and bathrobed neighbors wandering over with unbrushed teeth dies down, my mother catches my eye and nods.

That’s my signal to go in the house and dig up some more stuff.

There’s an episode of Shaun the Sheep where the Farmer opens a roadside vegetable stand and it’s so successful that he digs out a few more junked items from his shed – an old Polaroid camera, a chamberpot – to capitalize on the traffic. He puts his dog Bitzer in charge of running the stand, who then puts Shaun in charge when the Farmer leaves for town.

Shaun is a very good student, so he tells the flock to clean out the house for more stuff to sell, and in the Farmer’s absence, everything is sold, down to the clothesline, clothes still attached.

[An aside: For some reason, the official Shaun the Sheep channel is in Indonesian, which doesn’t matter since none of the characters use words to communicate. But Untung Jadi Buntung translates to Profit Becomes Loss, which is almost better than the English title of this episode: Everything Must Go.]

First, I survey my sister’s closet. She won’t miss anything, she’s never here anyway. She’s always at the Kinstlers’ house down the street to avoid my father’s belt and my mother trying to drown her in the shower when she gets the croup because no one can stand her tantrums anymore. I pluck out a couple of Liddle Kiddle Kologne dolls – the plastic bottles are clouded over and cracked – and an Ants in the Pants game. We haven’t played games together since Mom moved into the den, and even before that, she never played anyway.

In my room, I grab a Spirograph. A few of the disks are missing, but no one will care. I tote the new additions into the garage and add them to the sale. Years later, a neighbor told me that he loved our sales because he was able to fill his family’s rainy day box with enough games for an entire year for just a few dollars. And Jane said she’d see our old toys at her friend’s house, she didn’t even know it was for sale.

Tomorrow I will grab more, even stuff I don’t want to sell because right now my mother needs me.

And that’s something I’m not familiar with.

This Week’s Takeaway: If you are responsible for producing something — anything — on a regular schedule, or else it’s your turn and you just can’t manage it for whatever reason, what can you recycle instead? Surely you have something in the barn, in storage, in a very old hard drive… And if you’re worried that someone will notice, they probably won’t, because the current firehose of modern life means that we all basically can’t remember anything these days.