We were headed toward Magnolia Village when we paused for a stop sign and saw the notice. There, amongst all the other signs advertising garage sales, was one that sparkled with appeal. It read: "NOW APPEARING! 'The Curse of the Garage Sale' - Once you start buying, you'll never stop!"
Now, I'm not a habitué of garage sales, but this come-on ignited my curiosity. We had driven another block when we saw another sign: "SEE IT NOW! 'Indiana Jones and the Tower of Junque.'"
We finally got to the house where the sale was taking place. There were flags and plastic flamingos on the front lawn. The nearest place I could find to park was a block away.
Plunging right into the crowd we began to examine the offered merchandise and - well, the only way I can begin to describe it is "unique."
The first thing to attract my eye was a cardboard box of record albums. (I'm one of those rare persons who still have a working turntable.) When I inspected the box, however, I realized the entire contents was dreaded disco discs. (It's a well-known fact that polyester clothing, disco music, snowmobiles and yard work are all proven carcinogens.)
My partner, the Lady Marjorie, was initially attracted to a table filled with obscure, and somewhat threatening, household electrical appliances. There, amidst the five-horsepower egg beater, the automatic crepe cooker and the power pancake flippers, she found a box of 4-inch-long wire cylinders with spikes coming out of them.
I had no idea as to what their ultimate use was.
"How much ya want for these?" Lady M asked the woman who was running the sale.
"Well, they're virtually brand new," the woman replied, "but I believe I'd take five dollars."
"But they're missing the cord," my partner countered.
With that remark, she opened the door to begin the facet of "The Sport of Shopping" that simply purchasing items at the mall lacks: the art of haggling for a deal.
"Who knows where," the Lady M continued, "I can find a cord that will fit, and by then you'll be long gone - and they might not even work."
"I'm tellin' ya, they work," the woman retreated, "an' I'll come down to three-fifty."
"Those wooden boxes," the Lady M asked, skillfully changing the sub- ject. "Fifty cents apiece seems like a fair price - I'll take all five.
"These curlers, though - weren't there supposed to be some kind of wire picks that came with these?"
(What wire picks? What curlers? What was she talking about?)
"Since you're takin' the boxes too," said the woman, "I'll give ya the curlers for three dollars. I don't know where the picks are."
The only thing that I saw that I wanted, was one of the flamingoes from the yard display, and I was quite willing to pay the two-dollar asking price. During the last few hours of any garage sale is when the haggling really begins to get intense, but I wasn't ready to drive off and then come back and chance that another flamingo fancier hadn't come by. I bought the bird.
"What are those electrical things you bought?" I asked the Lady M as we headed home.
"They're electric hair curlers," Lady Marjorie said. "They used to sell them about 15 years ago - I don't even know if they'll work in my hair or not."
We drove past another sign for yet another sale, and the frenzy hit us; I pulled the car to the curb.
When we walked into the yard, we discovered we'd ambled into much more than just a garage sale. An elderly gent was staging a combination retirement/moving sale in preparation for a move back to Montana. He'd enlisted the help of Judy, one of my neighbors who runs a moving/estate sales service, and together they were shedding 30 years of accumulations.
As we moved from musty room to musty room and looked at the old pictures and books offered for sale, I remembered the one moving sale I had held. There were some items, like many of this gent's tools, that even though unused in quite some time, seemed like old friends that were hard to part with.
Lady M found a curler set identical to the one she'd just bought, but with picks and cord. The guy's wife had once sold beauty supplies, and this set looked brand new.
"Look," my partner exclaimed, "they're only marked 50 cents!"
"Judy said they don't use those anymore," remarked the old guy. "You're the only person that's shown any interest in them."
I found a set of dumbbells and weights that I could use in my on- going physical therapy program, and we left loaded down and happy. The Lady M had completed a full morning of successful haggling with someone other than me.
But after she'd tried out her new/ old curlers, she found out why the used-car lots of the early 1960s were filled with Edsels: people just didn't want the things.
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