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Bubonic Yard Sale
There are a few inscrutable world mysteries that even the wisest Levite will never unravel.
For instance, why do 40-year-old men (like my brother) still wear underpants they bought in high school? Or how can your daughter be the spitting image of your mother-in-law, but you love her anyway?
And then, of course, there is the most vexing question of them all: What kind of fools have yard sales?
The first two may elude the mavens for many more centuries, but I think I’ve got the last one licked: My wife and I had a yard sale. Perhaps too chicken to ask for a divorce, we thought this activity, barring a homicide, might push us over the goal line.
A few weeks ago, we started cleaning our rowhouse, which had come to resemble a Mexico City landfill. Days later, my wife called me at work with a brilliant idea. “Let’s have a yard sale,” she chirped. “We’ll really cut down on the clutter and we’ll make a few bucks.”
Sadly, that sounded reasonable.
Not to exaggerate, but my wife has spent tens of thousands of dollars at places charitably referred to as second-hand shops. I imagined myself brilliantly unloading these items to buyers even less savvy than she, for vast sums of money, thus funding a new wing on our manse.
Believe it or not, it didn’t quite work out that way.
My wife informed me that her stuff would not be evicted. A yard sale was for junk, she said, which she loosely defined as any item I owned that was ever perspired in by Johnny Unitas.
She scoured our home (and by scoured I don’t mean to imply “cleaned” ), her noble goal to rid the place of any sign that I ever once lived or breathed there.
Here are a few items she targeted for extermination: One suit, 32 short, hand-cut by my Uncle Jerome for my Grandpa Max. My bar mitzvah phylacteries. The No. 7 jersey I wore in high school football (carefully preserved just in case someone creates a Hall of Fame for the Lousy and they want to enshrine me).
Equipment from my mind-blowing magic act. A rather large collection of ceramic dogs my mother insisted I needed. And anything that ever decorated the walls, floors or bathroom fixtures of 1014 Weldon Ave., the house in Hampden a once-ecstatic bachelor inhabited.
In any event, after we wrestled over what would not be sold, I began to answer a never-ending stream of phone calls from friends, neighbors, relatives and long-lost college roommates. They all went something like this: “Hi, Jack. Tell K. we’ll pop by around 10 in the rented 18-wheeler and drop off our stuff for the yard sale. Just keep anything that doesn’t sell. No need to thank us. Bye.”
My wife actually drove to her sister’s in Atlanta to pick up four dispirited dining room chairs. This furniture was beyond the help of even a master carpenter and instead required the services of a psychiatrist with full prescriptive authority.
As these developments mounted, I was flung into a coma. But my wife soldiered on. She placed an ad on Craig’s List, just in case there were any pedophiles out there that didn’t know our address. And on a freezing, muddy March morning, the moment was at hand. My backyard was transformed into a veritable “crapateria.”
By the end of the day, we pocketed $17.43, or roughly one-third what it cost us to haul away our friends’ unsold merchandise. We also collected some hard-earned wisdom.
I came to realize that the obsession to yard sale is a fever of the bubonic variety. It jumps like a flea from a rat to bite and infect every homeowner at least once, blinding them to a bitter truth:
Crap, like energy, is never diminished. It merely relocates.
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