Trivial Pursuits: Swappers at heart
By:
Jamie Hult, Staff writer
It was a sweltering summer day with intermittent showers. The sprinkling had already started, in fact, when we were setting up for a garage sale at 7:30 a.m.
I frowned at the sky and the well-meaning lady who drove up wondering if we were open yet when we were obviously arranging items on tables and our ad clearly said the sale started at 8 a.m.
Inside the house my daughter was frowning at the bakery bagels my well-meaning boyfriend’s mom had dashed out to procure at dawn.
“I don’t like bagels,” declared Greta, who had never turned down a sugar-filled anything in her life.
Outside, I was busy making sure none of my 7-year-old’s “approved” garage sale toys left the car trunk before she left for a 10 a.m. play date.
If I never see another yellow sticker in my life, I’ll die happy. We had stickers. We had stickers upon stickers – even on items at the 25-cent table, which didn’t need to be stickered. I sorted a stack of 5T clothes, tried to keep track of the money bag and kept going. Soon we would be in business.
Virginia’s nail polish was the first section to be swooped: two dozen brand new bottles of pink, red, purple and peach, at 25 cents a bottle. I dashed home mid-sale to grab more Greta clothes, which were selling like hotcakes at 50 cents apiece, and I kept the local swapping community abreast with Facebook posts on the three guitars and half a dozen designer purses we desperately wanted to be rid of – not to mention the 66-piece set of Pfaltzgraff dishes we didn’t have the energy to drag out.
We had our share of interesting customers over the next nine hours: a family from Guatemala who had missed their flight home and were garage-saling to kill time before the next flight; a tween who was so adorable she talked us down to $35 on a $50 electric guitar, which she wanted to play both Metallica and classical music; a cowboy type who broke out a $20 for a Land’s End wool sweater and a set of elegant wine glasses; the mother of the editor of Model Railroad magazine who picked up an old locomotive radio handset my boyfriend had been hanging onto.
When the customers dwindled, we all sweated in lawn chairs in the shade of the garage, fair-skinned and freckled me most of all.
I’m a thrifter myself, and I’ve noticed there’s something about garage sales that brings people together. Bargain-hunting is a universal language, and at one point I looked out at the small crowd milling about our stuff and thought, “These people are my people.” Why they wanted to look through my old stuff, I can’t say, but why did I regularly hit the rummages to look through theirs? Are we all swappers at heart?
I had a fascinating conversation with an in-home day care provider about educational toys (I happily sold her two dollars’ worth), and my boyfriend got a kick out of discussing “Moonlight Sonata” with the guitar girl, who came by our sale not once, but three times, to eye the shiny black guitar, the last time bringing her Pekingese, Gizmo. (She wouldn’t consider a trade: dog for guitar).
At the end of the afternoon we loaded what was left into my car trunk and leaving heavy stuff for what we’d decided should be another garage sale the following Saturday. A few days later, we mutually vetoed that notion in favor of a large donation to Goodwill.
