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Neighborly
Nov. 1st, 2008 11:39 amDriving around the neighborhood earlier this morning, I saw a lot of cars parked around the front of one house. At first I thought it must be some really, really long-running Halloween party, but then I saw a bunch of stuff sitting out on the lawn, like shoes and boxes full of dolls and stuff. Ah, yes, Saturday morning is garage sale time! So I parked in an empty spot and started browsing.
The shoes were kinda boring and okay. Didn't really look at the dolls. A BlackJack II box caught my eye, but it had everything except the phone in it. It even had the sim card. WTF, I thought, I hope you got everything off that first. Not that I get why I'm supposed to want this box full of manuals and installation CDs anyway.
So there was another big cardboard box with office supply-type stuff, which I looked at, and saw that it had a sketchbook in it. More specifically, it had someone's sketchbook in it. I looked, and it had been drawn in already. I thought it might only be the first few pages, but no, every single one was full. I couldn't get my head around it. Are the drawings themselves supposed to be valuable? They're not even good.
Under the sketchbook was another similar sketchbook. Under that was a single issue of some teen magazine. A lot of this, I thought, is just trash. They're just trying to get people to throw their stuff away for them. I got a little indignant. No respect. People don't understand how we do things around here. Adfjrlgjakjhlkf. I finally put the sketchbook down and moved on.
There wasn't much else there. I did see, near the house itself, dozens and dozens of photographs spread out and lying directly on the grass. A man was sitting in a lawn chair with a photo album in his hand, and a stack of others beside him, peeling the pictures out one at a time, with a weak-adhesive-breaking noise, and laying them face up on the ground. A woman, probably the wife, was fixing or straightening them somehow.
This, at last, was too weird. I caught someone's attention, and asked, in my world-famous, gold medal-winning Innocently Confused Voice, "I-is this not a garage sale?"
"No," a teenage daughter explained. "We just had a fire."
The shoes were kinda boring and okay. Didn't really look at the dolls. A BlackJack II box caught my eye, but it had everything except the phone in it. It even had the sim card. WTF, I thought, I hope you got everything off that first. Not that I get why I'm supposed to want this box full of manuals and installation CDs anyway.
So there was another big cardboard box with office supply-type stuff, which I looked at, and saw that it had a sketchbook in it. More specifically, it had someone's sketchbook in it. I looked, and it had been drawn in already. I thought it might only be the first few pages, but no, every single one was full. I couldn't get my head around it. Are the drawings themselves supposed to be valuable? They're not even good.
Under the sketchbook was another similar sketchbook. Under that was a single issue of some teen magazine. A lot of this, I thought, is just trash. They're just trying to get people to throw their stuff away for them. I got a little indignant. No respect. People don't understand how we do things around here. Adfjrlgjakjhlkf. I finally put the sketchbook down and moved on.
There wasn't much else there. I did see, near the house itself, dozens and dozens of photographs spread out and lying directly on the grass. A man was sitting in a lawn chair with a photo album in his hand, and a stack of others beside him, peeling the pictures out one at a time, with a weak-adhesive-breaking noise, and laying them face up on the ground. A woman, probably the wife, was fixing or straightening them somehow.
This, at last, was too weird. I caught someone's attention, and asked, in my world-famous, gold medal-winning Innocently Confused Voice, "I-is this not a garage sale?"
"No," a teenage daughter explained. "We just had a fire."
