Garage Sailed Away
Saturday, September 13th, 2003Had the garage sale this morning. We set everything up in the garage the night before but decided to hold the sale in the driveway. We’ve got a great location in our neighborhood and, as it was a neighborhood-wide garage sale, were the first stop for many shoppers (we’re one of the first houses in our subdivision). The first hour was crazy; we weren’t even done pulling our loaded tables out onto the driveway and already had a dozen people ready to buy stuff. Erin called them the “Garage Sale Sharks”. We probably sold 60% of all our items before 8:45am. By noon we were down to the bottom of the barrel. The stuff we REALLY didn’t want to keep around - piles of magazines, old clothes that didn’t fit, software for a PC that I don’t even own any more (sold it for $45). So we started cutting prices way back until we were down to just a table of old kitchen tools and some clothes. In the end we sold most of what was left for a few dollars and gave the rest to some ladies who were on their way to a church giveaway. So I have about 6 items that will need to go to Goodwill, and we sold probably 6 tables of stuff in a little over 4 hours.
This garage sale was an unusual experience. On the one hand there are strangers giving me a little bit of money to cart my old junk away. On the other hand, this junk consists of items that I’ve had for years and years. There’s the mattress I’ve had since I was 12, there’s the bookshelf where I stored my models as a kid, there’s the bulletin board I’ve owned for over 30 years. These items have a history with me and I with them. In particular, the “Jos. A Tarbell” nautical bulletin board has hung on the wall of every room I’ve ever lived in since I was born. I remember tracing its outlines lying in bed as a child. It followed me to college when I left home in ‘87 and went with me when I got married ten years later. It hung on the wall of my home office covered with appointments and notes when I was getting my business started. There were years when I never saw the picture of the old tavern sign printed on the cork… just the stacks of overlapping quotes and notes and “call back” reminders pinned to the front with colored thumbtacks. So I guess I started to feel that somehow it really meant something to me. Erin couldn’t believe I wanted to sell it, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it had become that most dangerous of sentimental items - the kind you can’t bear to give away. The kind of possession that doesn’t really hold much emotional value, it’s just gained so much temporal inertia in your life you can’t imagine being without it. And yet, as it sat half buried in the closet for the last 2 years, I realized that it wasn’t truly special; just a broken down old bulletin board with a piece of wire where the hangar should have been.
It seems like so many of our material things are like that. They add nothing to our lives but accumulated dust and only pretend to remind us of something important.
Some things– pictures, vacation mementos, gifts from lost friends, items passed down from grandparents, old cammo hats worn on a thousand adventures– some old things are worth carting around from home to home. They’re worth storing in boxes and lovingly placed in the attic to be uncovered decades later. Some small items are worth carrying throughout your life and being buried with, because they define who we are and what we find most important. And other things -like broken down 30 year old “Jos. A Tarbell” bulletin boards- aren’t really important after all.