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Doug Clark: Consult your doctor before hosting yard sale
Buyer: “So what’ll you take for this, um, glossy blue chunk of compressed carbon?”
Seller: “Ha. Ha. Good one. Well, what’re you offering?”
Buyer: “Oh, four bucks, maybe.”
Seller: “Four bucks? But that’s the actual Hope Diamond you’re holding there.”
Buyer: “Oh. Wow. Didn’t know that. The Hope Diamond. Hmm. How’s five bucks sound?”
My lovely wife, Sherry, and I are still decompressing from the massive yard sale we held while I was using up my vacation days.
We didn’t realize how much back-aching toil it would take to get our unneeded belongings ready to be poked and prodded by the bargain-hunting public. By then it was too late to do the sensible thing and hire an arsonist to set it all ablaze.
It took a full week to unearth the stuff that we had been accumulating for the past 30 years. My son, Ben, and daughter, Emily, launched an archeological dig on the third floor, where all of their old toys were commingling in a tangled mass of cardboard, Barbies and lightsabers.
But assembling merchandise is just part of what it takes to pull off a yard sale.
There are so many intangibles to deal with, like, say, shooing away the snooping woman who wandered uninvited into our home a full day before the sale.
Really. On Friday I was sitting innocently on the couch in our den listening to Sherry conduct a yard sale strategy session.
She had drawn a map depicting where all the tables and furniture were supposed to go. Although to be perfectly honest, it looked more to me like an outline for Pickett’s Charge.
I was about to nod off when my eye caught some unexpected movement to my left.
For a second I thought I had developed a variation of the supernatural gift that young Haley Joel Osment displayed in that creepy movie, “The Sixth Sense.”
“I see odd people.”
A second glance told me this was no ethereal visitation. A middle-aged woman was surveying our kitchen as if she was about to rearrange the cutlery.
What the $&^%!!
“Can I help you?” I said in a sarcastic tone.
“Is this the liquidation sale?” she replied, as if she wanted to check out a designer handbag at Nordstrom.
Brother.
I gave her the bum’s rush, scolding her about how the ad we published in this fine newspaper was quite explicit.
“Saturday only – No early birds.”
Speaking of which, our first actual customer was a nice old man who arrived two hours before the 9 a.m. start time.
He stood on the sidewalk, politely observing the line of yellow caution tape that we had strung between orange road cones. It made our yard look more like the scene of a homicide than a place to shop.
“Bbmmmbtzz,” I heard him say.
I walked closer and realized he was actually talking about bullets.
“Do you have any?” he said, explaining that he was an antique ammunition collector.
There’s something for everyone, huh?
Now, I wasn’t about to violate my no-early-birds policy. But as fate would have it, I had discovered a box of my grandfather’s old .32-20 ammo while tearing up the house for the yard sale.
Primarily a chicken farmer, my grandpa also served for years as prosecuting attorney for a small and obviously backward county in Utah.
He carried an old Colt revolver in his briefcase for protection. This was probably from fear of being attacked by some defendant who was terrified at the prospect of being prosecuted by a chicken rancher who had never acquired a law degree let alone gone to college.
I sold the pistol decades ago but kept the ammo as a souvenir. Since I wasn’t about to stick bullets in a yard sale along with my old radios, bowling trophies and Nixon mask, I figured it was all right to reward the aged collector’s persistence.
I gave him the bullets. He gave me 10 bucks.
Capitalism is a fine thing, no matter what Bernie Sanders says.
I can’t kick about our yard sale. Jokes aside, the people who showed up were fun-loving, wonderful folks, although there are signs that our traditional concept of the nuclear family is changing.
One burly father figure, for example, showed up with wife, child and a formidable-looking handgun strapped around his waist.
I could never go to a yard sale packing heat.
On the other hand, it would definitely give you an edge while haggling over the price of a used waffle iron, say.
As the hours crawled by, we watched at least two-thirds of our belongings change hands.
Action figures, books and magazines, a Morris chair, Robby the Robot, lamps, vases, rotary telephones, posters, an old drive-in speaker, a lava lamp, oak office chairs, Elvis memorabilia, bookshelves, Fisher-Price toys, Fiestaware, stereo speakers …
Holding a yard sale is like giving your domicile an enema.
Whatever was left over we gave to charity and a deserving friend.
A final thought before you start purging your attic and basement: Take my advice and check with your physician or faith healer to see if your head won’t explode from the stress.
Oh, and bar the doors or you just might see odd people near your toaster.
Doug Clark is a columnist for The Spokesman-Review. He can be reached at (509) 459-5432 or by email at dougc@spokesman.com.