Saturday, June 05, 2004

Everything must go...

Everything must go...

I'm sitting in my garage and it's a breezy but nice 75 degrees (F) outside as I look at the lane that runs in front of my house and a line of bumper to bumper cars parked up and down the block. I have tables and tables of items I like to call stuff, sometimes junk or when customers are not around, crap because it's our annual tradition where we put tiny pieces of masking tape on the items we find around the house, items we don't need (it's hard to defend that we need ANYthing), items marked so low it would make Wal Mart cry.

We set our not-so-lovely parting gifts out in seemingly random piles, in and around the garage, extending out to the driveway when space is needed, and we raise the garage door which is just as good as any retail establishment's neon Open sign. The symbol of the open garage door with a table of junk-crap-stuff sitting underneath of it does something to people. It sets into motion a universal invite to fellow residents from around the county to come, peruse our stuff-crap-junk we no longer want but that another family just might also not need.

Here's the great part - they PAY us for this! Oh yeah, I can't believe it either. They pay us to lighten our household burdens and add to theirs. Is a society dependent on materialistic needs great or what? God bless America and our capitalist ways.

Sitting here for the past couple of days watching folk of all ilk walk up, pick up our crap-stuff-junk and study it for several minutes as if they were trying to translate passages from an ancient Mayan scroll, there is one adage that keeps going through my mind: "One man's junk-stuff-crap is another man's treasure." And don't think this sexist passage is just limited to one gender either, Packratitis is a disease that affects everyone and treatment should not be sought, at least not until we close our garage door.