The solstice has ushered in summer, and with the sun comes America’s favorite pastime—no, not baseball—garage sales!
In the book Travels with Charley, Steinbeck traveled across the country in search of Americans that define our nation. I say, “Mr. Steinbeck, no need to travel the country. If you want to meet a true cross-section of Americans, just have a garage sale.”
Shawn and I had never held a garage sale ourselves, but moving from our Tallahassee townhouse to a single-room apartment in New York City necessitated the event. Armed with our first-timer enthusiasm and the faint memories of our parent’s garage sales (crinkled bills, jingling silver, and the painful, forced sale of old toys), we set out to unload four years of accumulated college-quality junk.
6:00am - Met my wife with a tired look as NPR clicked on our clock radio. We had been up until 2:00am the previous night pricing, which brings me to my first tip. We had many items. After realizing how long it would take to price each one, we began to throw like items into shallow cardboard boxes and put a single price on the outside. Then, as each item came up, I would ask Shawn, “quarter box, or dime box?” Shawn would glance at the item and pass down her verdict.
Near the end of the night, I said, “Shawn, 25 cents or a quarter on this one?” We both laughed so loud it woke up the dog.
6:15am – The coffee pot is rumbling as I walk out to Ocala Road to strategically post our garage sale signs. When I return to the house, there is a Cadillac parked parallel to our driveway and a bleary-eyed, white-whiskered old man standing in my empty carport. “Am I too early?” he asks. I check my watch. 6:30am. The garage sale ad in the Tallahassee Democrat stated 8:00am. This leads me to tip #2: If you don’t want early birds, you must state it in your ad. Then, they’ll come anyway.
Shawn and I drag items out the sliding glass door of our porch and arrange them in a semi-circle with the priciest items in the front, the nickel box in the back. The old man gathers together a pile of our things, thoughtfully smoking a cigar and sipping his coffee.
“Where ya’ll movin’?”
“New York City.”
“Hmph. Let’s talk.”
We move to his pile. He has our framed poster prints, blender, and some stuff from our quarter box. At a quick glance, I calculate $14. I soon find that the old man has another price in mind.
“These posters aren’t worth much. Frames are good. I’ll get money for them in the junk shop I own.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll give you ten bucks for the lot.”
“Sold!”
7:03am – A mother and daughter show up. Shawn and I now have our coffee and have abandoned our planned breakfast of bacon and eggs for hastily eaten granola bars. The young girl and her mother root through the 50 cent and 25 cent boxes, take a few items, and then the daughter tries on some of my wife’s clothes. The entire time they speak softly to each other in Spanish. Though I just graduated with a Spanish minor, I understand nothing.
When it comes time to buy, we bag up their items and I say to the couple, “Is this all?” The daughter—I guess she is about ten—shyly translates my sentence for her mother, her eyes downcast. The mother then says something to her daughter in Spanish.
“We would also like the dresser,” the daughter says. The mother nods at me, confident that her daughter has translated her desires.
“That’ll be twenty-two,” I say. I round down.
“Veinte y dos,” the daughter says to her mother.
The mother pulls the bills out slowly, weighing the purchase in her mind. She hands them over, and I help her load the dresser into her pickup truck. I step back into the carport and reflect on the quiet pair as the truck grumbles to life.
7:34am – Two cars pull up at the same time. Neither driver chooses to park in the empty spaces of our apartment parking lot, instead parking side-by-side, effectively blocking all avenues of exit for my neighbors. I cringe.
One lady, a middle-aged African American, looks over our electronics, asks us of our camera works, then buys a glass flower vase and a table cloth instead. She leaves.
The other woman, a 30-something blond with equally blond armpit hair goes straight for Shawn’s clothes. My wife is a size 2. This lady was not, yet she tried on several items, desperately trying to button a shirt over her massive boobs. When she asks me my opinion, I tell her it looks great on her. Shawn tries to conceal her laughter.
After choosing a few shirts, she turns to my old radio that is softly playing The Morning Edition on NPR. Though it is still early, she takes the liberty of changing the station to country and cranking up the volume. I cringe for the second time, and sell it to her for $2 so to have an excuse to unplug it.
8:04am – Our second male arrives, buys my ghastly PEZ collection for $2, and asks us where we’re going.
“New York City.”
“Cool.”
He then purchases the only other poster frame that our first customer didn’t buy and wishes us luck.
8:15am – Our neighbor, Hazel, comes to sit with us on our porch. We engage in casual small talk, from our plans in New York to her dog’s allergies. She doesn’t shop our sale, which is fine because there are others browsing. When she leaves we understand she didn’t come to shop. She was just being a nosy neighbor and that was fine with us—she didn’t complain about the people milling about or their inability to park between two white lines.
8:30am – Two sisters show up in a SUV. One eyes our barstools with the blue velvet cushions. She picks at a gold tooth in her mouth.
“Just $6 for both of these?”
“Yeah,” I answer, wishing I hadn’t just marked them down from ten.
“That’s cheap.”
“Priced to sell,” I say.
She stops picking at her tooth. “I’ll take them!” she says, and hands me the $6.
“What! I saw them first!” her sister complains to me. Shawn smartly walks away while a sisterly argument erupts. I shrug my shoulders and they fight all the way back to their car.
8:43am – “So, when do all the students leave?”
The blond lady with the equally blond armpit hair is still here, talking to me as she picks through the dime box. The “students” as she calls them, already left two months ago at the end of spring term, but I am trying to get rid of her because she is boisterous and annoying the other customers.
“Oh, they’ll be leaving in late July,” I say.
“Ok, because when they leave they throw out all their stuff and I like to pick through it.”
“Oh,” I say, at a total loss for words.
She buys a few dime items and grabs her radio and too-small shirts and leaves. Shawn and I jointly roll our eyes and smile, then spend the next half hour gossiping about her.
10:25am – A red Saturn coupe pulls up and out pops a short lady with running shorts on and a crop of black hair.
“Where ya’ll moving to?”
“New York.”
“What part?”
“Manahattan.”
“Oh, I just came from there. I grew up in Brooklyn.”
We talk with her quite a bit. We learn that her husband works with the university at putting new student housing up. She shops garage sales for gifts for her friends, and is an admitted candle freak, which proves true when she buys every one we have.
“I’ll take this lamp too,” she says, “even though I don’t have a place for it. It is so cute!”
I find this statement interesting since we are selling it because we don’t have a place for it ourselves. This is the beauty of selling items at a garage sale. People will buy things they don’t need if only because they are cute. She leaves with three bags of stuff.
“Good luck.”
10:36am – Two African American women show up.
“Do you have any furniture for sale?”
We show them our table inside our townhouse and offer it to her for $20. She seems really excited, says that it’s just what she’s looking for, and that she really needs it. I wonder how she will get it back home since she arrived with her friend in a small Honda.
“I’ll have to see if I can borrow my neighbor’s truck. I’ll be back at noon.”
1:00pm – The women still haven’t returned for the table. We have learned a lesson, and offer up our next tip: If someone wants something but doesn’t have the means to move it immediately, get a deposit.
Shawn begins consolidating items into the quarter boxes.
2:15pm – We haven’t had a customer for an hour and fifteen minutes. Shawn cuts the prices on all remaining items in half. As if they could hear our marker slashing prices, two cars show up. An elderly, heavily wrinkled white lady buys a hoard of quarter items. The other, another old lady with a soft black afro buys our wicker baskets, a mixer, and both our computer chairs.
2:23pm – A man shows up with his daughters, one about 17, the other a preteen. They quickly glance over our dwindling possessions, frown, and they complain that they couldn’t see our garage sale signs as they sped off.
A lady who was browsing through Shawn’s clothes watches the whole scene.
“I didn’t have any trouble finding it,” she offers. The way she says it sounds like an apology, trying to make up for the rudeness of her fellow shopper. When her total comes to $6.85, I round down to six. Both of us are happy.
2:50pm – A door slams next door and our Cuban neighbor comes out.
“When you moving?”
“Mid-July.”
“Where you going?”
“New York City.”
“Oh, I’m moving soon too—to Texas. New York is a great place. Are you going to settle there?”
“No, we’re just going for a few years.”
“Well, it’ll be a good experience. Too expensive for my taste, though, and the city is too busy for me.”
“Yeah,” I say, though the busyness is half the reason we’re going.
He buys our Polaroid camera and some duffel bags, and then goes back next door. In the five years I’ve lived here, that’s the most he’s ever spoken to me.
3:05pm – A woman arrives with her daughter. She had bought a few items earlier in the day, and has returned, as promised, to let her daughter try on a few of Shawn’s clothes. They buy a dress, and leave.
3:30pm – I have taken down the signs and Shawn has consolidated what remains of the sale into three cardboard boxes. I load the boxes into the trunk of my car for a later drop off at Goodwill. Shawn’s leftover clothes will be taken to the local Women’s Abuse Shelter of Tallahassee.
4:00pm – Shawn is asleep on the couch and I am writing this entry, reflecting on our day. We had declared it a success, over $200 richer and having reduced our stuff from a carport to a car trunk.
I think of…[At this point, the pen scrawls across the page and the entry ends, as I have also fallen asleep.]
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