By Carl Sampson
They say baseball is America’s pastime, and I don’t doubt it. But another uniquely American passion is certainly in the same ballpark with baseball: garage sales.
I know, many of you are rolling your eyes. Garage sales aren’t sporting events, you say. And they aren’t entertainment.
To that, I have a single reply — Ha! Anyone who has ever gone to a garage sale knows they are both a sporting event and entertainment. In fact, the way the Mariners are playing these days, I’d say garage sales have them beat on both counts.
We recently had a garage sale and it was absolutely amazing. We were getting ready to move. Like most folks, we have way too much stuff. As we sorted through it, my wife and I decided it was garage sale time. Either that, or we were going to have to move this junk ourselves.
Well, it wasn’t exactly junk. The vast majority was stuff we had used at one time or another but had been relegated to the storage room or the garage, like the kite we had used exactly twice at the coast. Some of them were duplicates. In the garage alone, I counted seven rolls of that white plumber’s tape, three levels and 472 billion nuts, bolts, screws, brackets and thingamabobs that I had no idea what they were. I’m sure at some point during the past 10 years, I had needed them all, but once the project had either been completed — or abandoned — they had been exiled to the garage. As I contemplated moving them to our new digs, I had zero enthusiasm for keeping them.
Wouldn’t it be great if someone would pay me and then make them all disappear? I thought.
That, in a nutshell, is the beauty of a garage sale. People come to your house, give you money and then take your excess stuff away.
Can life get any better than that?
But what really makes a garage sale a sporting/ entertainment event is the passion that shoppers display.
Years ago, we had a garage sale. We advertised in the newspaper that it would start at 8 a.m. By 7:30, the crowd had started to gather in our driveway. By 7:45, people were ringing the doorbell. By the time “kickoff” arrived, we had a minor riot on our hands. One shopper came charging up the front steps and into the kitchen looking for the microwave we had advertised. On her way out, she was pointing at everything she saw asking, “Is that for sale?”
Most recently, I knew it was going to be a good sale when, shortly after 8 a.m., a neighbor wheeled up in front of the house and jumped out of her car. She had spied the sign as she was driving to pick up a friend.
“When I saw the sign I knew I had to stop,” she said as she checked out three ceramic round things we had “won” at an auction.
What I liked best was her uniform.
She was wearing pajamas, a bath robe and fuzzy pink slippers.
Game on!
