I’m not a big fan of garage sales. As someone who traffics in high-end junk typically categorized as primitive Americana—I call everything we antiques dealers buy and sell “junk”. You can say crap, if you prefer, I mix that term with junk. When I first started collecting antiques in Texas some 35 years ago, I had been to a few local antiques fairs, and most of what you saw for sale could be legitimately classified as antique—handmade in the 19th century or earlier. Go to the same local antiques fairs these days, you will find exhibits stretching for miles, many of them organized into shows with names and known for certain categories of goods, such as Americana, and you will find a little bit of everything—antiques, yes, from here and abroad, and lots of collectibles. Some of the merchandise displayed at these shows and fairs entered the market from garage sales and now carry big price tags. Frankly, such good fortune is rare, in spite of popular notions. I’ve been fortunate enough to score a few treasures at garage sales and resale shops. Ninety-nine percent of what shows up in someone’s yard or in a thrift store with a price tag of pennies, however, is truly ordinary—clothing, kitchen stuff, toys, bedding, costume jewelry, old books and records, some bad art, and so the story goes. For those who claim to be antiques dealers but who really trade in collectibles, garage sales and thrift stores just might be the ticket. I’ve heard one dealer proclaim, “I don’t pay anything for my merchandise. I buy it all at garage sales and thrift stores.” Yeah, it shows.
If you’re lucky enough to come up on a garage sale where the hosts are sending out a treasure or two, bully for you. Every dog has his day in the sunshine. I can count the garage sales I’ve hosted or participated in on one hand, and every one of these sales has included lots of things that I wish I could have sold for legitimate money. “You make your money in the buying, not in the selling,” claims a local guy in the junk trade. That makes sense to me, and I hope the garage sale that six households hosted on our place in rural Leon County this last weekend ends up making some money for one of the buyers. It probably won’t be much, however, because all of us are card-carrying collectors, and we pretty much knew what we had.
So why do people have garage sales? When you consider that the sellers paid good money for much of what they are now sending back out into the world, you take into account the time spent gathering and organizing the goods—this after much consideration about whether you are finally ready to let go of some particular treasure…whether it’s an old jug of unknown heritage or a pair of high heels little worn that cost a pretty penny in the beginning…you’re already deep in the hole. Consider the cost of advertising in the newspaper, making signs and putting them out, the time putting out the stuff, putting up with the public, boxing up the leftovers to go to the thrift store—that is, if you don’t go back through the stuff and reclaim some of it or most of it—delivering it to the thrift store, gathering the signs because you don’t want to be another blight on the landscape, and it promises to be a lot less painful to just load it up and haul it off to begin with.
Maybe the process of having a garage sale is the reason itself. I have been stumbling over things that I finally started putting in boxes and setting them aside with the intent of carrying them to the thrift store. Some of these things I had bought for virtually nothing and had high hopes of turning into a profit. The cost to me of other single items would have provided a decent dinner for two at one of the well-known local chains. Clothes I don’t wear anymore, well, I’d rather just donate them. Clearing the closet and chest-of-drawers of shirts and t-shirts that languish unworn can be troublesome for me. Hurricane Katrina, however, got me off the fence a few years back. Once my neighbors, my two sisters and I had made the decision to have a garage sale, I forced myself to search one cupboard or another, facing the task of trying to make sense of stuff that I had just stashed to get it out of the way because I couldn’t decide what to do with it. For all of us who are born junkers, we understand how easily these stashes can take on lives of their own. The offering at our sale ranged from the usual food storage containers, glasses-cups-dishes, apparel, battered lampshade and ugly lamps, books, small and large appliances, bedding, cracked garden pottery, to a few pieces of decent furniture. In the country you can’t expect to draw the buyers that a city sale would have. Pick any city neighborhood and you have enough residents on the very block to equal the total crowd from miles around at a country event. Location, location, location.
By design our sale included food. What started as a cook-down for one evening of the two-day event turned into lunch and snacks and dinner for the entire two days. When it was all over, the boxes packed and the trailer loaded for a trip to one of the local charity thrift stores, we had all made a little money, lightened our load a little, laughed a lot, and gained a couple of pounds. It was a time of getting to know one another a little better, visiting with folks from the community, and sharing the bounty with neighbors. Sometimes it just feels good to give something away. At our final evening meal I discovered that one of our six hosts had a connection to the man who had offered me a job as head of the English department of the new suburban high school where I was scheduled to teach in the fall of 1967. One of our hosts had grown up in rural Mississippi and with her husband had lived a number of places in the south. Another and her husband had lived in several Texas cities and as far away as California. Our friend Jim had found his way from Ohio to Florida to Texas. Some of us had always lived near the Gulf Coast of Texas, and all of us had found our way to rural Leon County. Everyone was at home that evening.
Over the last year I have somehow managed to shy away from hauling home more trinkets of the sort that had been building up in my barn house for several years of junking. I’ve never had the garage sale habit that some have, and I’ve not had the habit of hitting lots of junk stores and resale shops. Although I have gone through periods of running my traps, just like any junker worth his or her salt, I’m learning to change my habits. Truthfully, though, I’ve only scratched the surface of worldly treasures that eventually will need to be dealt with. Yes, way too much crap still has a life of its own inside and around the two-story barn I call home. There’s also a lot of stuff with serious value, although the uninitiated wouldn’t have a clue. And I expect more of the same will show up here. Whether another garage sale is in my future, well, I wouldn’t want to say just now. Something defining though will have to happen at some point. This place is for sale, and the thought of packing and moving even the most valuable things makes my back weary and my spirit sag.
Selling from the Garage and Yard—Normangee, Texas (April 14, 2008)
R. Harold Hollis
If you’re lucky enough to come up on a garage sale where the hosts are sending out a treasure or two, bully for you. Every dog has his day in the sunshine. I can count the garage sales I’ve hosted or participated in on one hand, and every one of these sales has included lots of things that I wish I could have sold for legitimate money. “You make your money in the buying, not in the selling,” claims a local guy in the junk trade. That makes sense to me, and I hope the garage sale that six households hosted on our place in rural Leon County this last weekend ends up making some money for one of the buyers. It probably won’t be much, however, because all of us are card-carrying collectors, and we pretty much knew what we had.
So why do people have garage sales? When you consider that the sellers paid good money for much of what they are now sending back out into the world, you take into account the time spent gathering and organizing the goods—this after much consideration about whether you are finally ready to let go of some particular treasure…whether it’s an old jug of unknown heritage or a pair of high heels little worn that cost a pretty penny in the beginning…you’re already deep in the hole. Consider the cost of advertising in the newspaper, making signs and putting them out, the time putting out the stuff, putting up with the public, boxing up the leftovers to go to the thrift store—that is, if you don’t go back through the stuff and reclaim some of it or most of it—delivering it to the thrift store, gathering the signs because you don’t want to be another blight on the landscape, and it promises to be a lot less painful to just load it up and haul it off to begin with.
Maybe the process of having a garage sale is the reason itself. I have been stumbling over things that I finally started putting in boxes and setting them aside with the intent of carrying them to the thrift store. Some of these things I had bought for virtually nothing and had high hopes of turning into a profit. The cost to me of other single items would have provided a decent dinner for two at one of the well-known local chains. Clothes I don’t wear anymore, well, I’d rather just donate them. Clearing the closet and chest-of-drawers of shirts and t-shirts that languish unworn can be troublesome for me. Hurricane Katrina, however, got me off the fence a few years back. Once my neighbors, my two sisters and I had made the decision to have a garage sale, I forced myself to search one cupboard or another, facing the task of trying to make sense of stuff that I had just stashed to get it out of the way because I couldn’t decide what to do with it. For all of us who are born junkers, we understand how easily these stashes can take on lives of their own. The offering at our sale ranged from the usual food storage containers, glasses-cups-dishes, apparel, battered lampshade and ugly lamps, books, small and large appliances, bedding, cracked garden pottery, to a few pieces of decent furniture. In the country you can’t expect to draw the buyers that a city sale would have. Pick any city neighborhood and you have enough residents on the very block to equal the total crowd from miles around at a country event. Location, location, location.
By design our sale included food. What started as a cook-down for one evening of the two-day event turned into lunch and snacks and dinner for the entire two days. When it was all over, the boxes packed and the trailer loaded for a trip to one of the local charity thrift stores, we had all made a little money, lightened our load a little, laughed a lot, and gained a couple of pounds. It was a time of getting to know one another a little better, visiting with folks from the community, and sharing the bounty with neighbors. Sometimes it just feels good to give something away. At our final evening meal I discovered that one of our six hosts had a connection to the man who had offered me a job as head of the English department of the new suburban high school where I was scheduled to teach in the fall of 1967. One of our hosts had grown up in rural Mississippi and with her husband had lived a number of places in the south. Another and her husband had lived in several Texas cities and as far away as California. Our friend Jim had found his way from Ohio to Florida to Texas. Some of us had always lived near the Gulf Coast of Texas, and all of us had found our way to rural Leon County. Everyone was at home that evening.
Over the last year I have somehow managed to shy away from hauling home more trinkets of the sort that had been building up in my barn house for several years of junking. I’ve never had the garage sale habit that some have, and I’ve not had the habit of hitting lots of junk stores and resale shops. Although I have gone through periods of running my traps, just like any junker worth his or her salt, I’m learning to change my habits. Truthfully, though, I’ve only scratched the surface of worldly treasures that eventually will need to be dealt with. Yes, way too much crap still has a life of its own inside and around the two-story barn I call home. There’s also a lot of stuff with serious value, although the uninitiated wouldn’t have a clue. And I expect more of the same will show up here. Whether another garage sale is in my future, well, I wouldn’t want to say just now. Something defining though will have to happen at some point. This place is for sale, and the thought of packing and moving even the most valuable things makes my back weary and my spirit sag.
Selling from the Garage and Yard—Normangee, Texas (April 14, 2008)
R. Harold Hollis
No comments:
Post a Comment