Nickel and Dimed

My lesson in the proper schedule for engaging the ordinary American in commerce came this past Saturday morning at 7:52 A.M. We were all having breakfast at my parents' house, one week before they were due to leave behind the artificially smoothed landscape of Fairfax County for good and retreat to the ancestral Pacific haunt of my forbears. It was my final visit to the cookie-cutter tract house which they have admirably beautified over the course of a couple of decades -- wood floors replacing wall-to-wall beige carpet and a surrounding yard which has year by year become less and expanse of grass and more a system of interlocking flower beds. The back is so well shaded by forty-foot trees one almost forgets that it was not long ago an uglier-than-usual Northern Virginia slash-and-build housing development. The whole place bears little resemblence to the house I spent my last couple of years of high school in; it's a damn sight nicer now.

Changing house -- especially to a place without a basement -- requires the jettisoning of a lot of stuff, and hence a Garage Sale* was in order. Theresa and I came down to toast their farewell and to help with the proceedings. When we got in on Friday I asked Mom when she thought things would get going in the morning. "I put eight o'clock in the ad in the Post," she said. I asked her why she had committed herself to starting the bloody thing at the crack of dawn, figuring that, like me, most people want to sleep later on the weekend than they do on a working day. She smiled indulgently and told me that I'd understand the next day.

Wanting to be helpful, I hauled myself out of a positively drugged sleep (those suburban silences! There's nothing to wake you up in the morning -- no cars, no screaming, no street fairs, nothing) around 7:30 and padded upstairs for coffee. Slumped at the table with Theresa, the folks already chipper, I figured Dad would throw open the garage at 8 (referring to my father as "prompt" is like calling Oprah Winfrey "moderately well-off") and then stand around rearranging the tchotchkes until the countryside had time to wake up an hour or so later.

At 7:52, the doorbell rang. My mother sprang up. "They're here!" she said! A moment or two later, a crowd burst into our garage full of stuff that my original estimate put at about a seventy-dollar total resale value.

Ninety minutes and two hundred dollars later we were a plucked chicken. A done deal. The only thing left was a curling poster of Yes's Relayer album cover, a terrifying faux-china doll, and a wobbly desk chair dating from the Johnson administration. In a swirl of dollars and quarters the detritus of my parents' lives had been swept into minivans and SUVs to be redistributed across the county. The latecomers (and there were few) found that the early birds had been pleased to gorge themselves on the many inexpensive and questionably valuable worms my family had put forth.

I stood there with a half-empty cup of coffee, and was educated.

*some uncultured types refer to these as Yard Sales, but it's that kind of nonsense that you have to put up with in a democracy.

Posted by BT at June 10, 2002 06:06 PM