We got into more than a few fights over this particular statue. To me, it was the embodiment of levity and summarized my family’s quirky, not to be taken too seriously, attitude. Any insults directed towards the statue were personal assaults towards me and I would defend it as if it were my child.
Situations like this are pretty common. Inanimate objects are given personal feelings and often times they take on a life of their own. That’s why we love a particular bowl, are sad to throw out an old pair of snow boots and why the most emotionally exhausting experience in the world is a yard sale.
The girl I dated in high school didn’t get my parent’s sense of humor. She thought they were weird and tacky. The predominance of her opinion was based on a piece of art my parents exhibited in the entry way. To most people, it was an almost unnoticeable little plastic statue. To her, it was a cause for concern.
The statue was a plate of spaghetti, with the noodles stretched high above the plate and wrapped around a suspended fork that looked like it had been plucked out of someone’s hand. My parents called it, in medias res, which is Latin for in the middle of things. My girlfriend, however, called it trashy, which is Latin for, “If we had kids together, your parents wouldn’t be allowed to see them.”
We got into more than a few fights over this particular statue. To me, it was the embodiment of levity and summarized my family’s quirky, not to be taken too seriously, attitude. Any insults directed towards the statue were personal assaults towards me and I would defend it as if it were my child.
Situations like this are pretty common. Inanimate objects are given personal feelings and often times they take on a life of their own. That’s why we love a particular bowl, are sad to throw out an old pair of snow boots and why the most emotionally exhausting experience in the world is a yard sale.
A yard sale is clothes you should have never purchased, tables that wobble, dressers with drawers that screech and electronics that haven’t worked for a long time. It’s a collection of things you don’t want anymore or can’t justify keeping any longer, but, since you paid good money for that rock tumbler, you want something, anything, in return.
The lead up to the yard sale can be emotionally difficult. It’s the time when you have to cut your losses and admit you’ve made poor purchases in the past. It’s the time you have to say good-bye to a piece of garbage you’ve grown emotionally attached to. Some people are better than others at this, but almost everyone has a hard time getting rid of something.
A lot of the sentimental garbage that should be yard sale bound doesn’t make it out to the lawn. Someone in the family always puts up a big enough fight to keep their broken skis they used in high school. Some of the sentimental garbage makes it out to the lawn, but it’s clearly not for sale. When I say, “not for sale,” I mean an old mug priced at $40 or a lamp placed to the side that you can’t approach without the owner making you nervous by following you.
The summer after my freshman year of college, a yard sale wasn’t a labor day event, it was my summer’s goal. The previous year I’d spent broke and I needed to make enough money to last me my entire sophomore year. I could either sell everything I owned or get a job. I opted to sell everything because it simply didn’t fit in with my life anymore.
Like most kids who return home after a year away from the nest, I felt like I had completely changed. I was a new man. I was surprised anyone could recognize me. I thought, ‘Don’t they see that I’ve experienced so much? Can’t they see how I’m wearing my hair now?! Doesn’t that say EVERYTHING!!’
The combination of making a few bucks and cleansing myself of my former junk yielded an obvious solution – the mother of all yard sales. Everything had to go. Nothing I owned seemed to fit in with my new, sophisticated and mature lifestyle.
I convinced my entire family to join in and Labor Day weekend, we had ourselves a yard sale.
The first lesson I learned about yard sales is that some people show up early. People show up so early, I’d have to imagine their thought process goes like this:
“The Morris’s yard sale starts at 9:00 a.m.…which means all the good stuff will be gone by 8:00…which means the people who will try to beat the early birds will get there at 7:00, so I should get there at 4:00.”
My first sale of our 9:00 a.m. yard sale was a bedside table to a guy who said, “That’s the smallest damn thing I’ve ever seen!” at 5:43 a.m.
As I was drinking my first cup of coffee (which I didn’t like yet, but felt like faking since, “I’ve changed so much since high school!”) I transitioned from the first phase of a yard sale into the second.
In case you didn’t know, yard sales have three phases:
1. ”This is kind of fun. Wow! I’m making money! Maybe I should have charged double.”
2. ”I’m so bored of this. These people are disgusting. Yes, I’ll take a $.25 off that $1.25 lamp if that will make you buy it.”
3. ”What am I going to do if I don’t sell this crap?! I’m not lugging this stuff back inside! Does that dresser say $30? It’s supposed to say $.30.”
By 12:15 I had a new rule that anyone who tried to barter was immediately banished from buying anything while people who didn’t were rewarded with getting what they’d picked out for free. It’s pretty much the worst business model for a yard sale, but I’d just spent 40 minutes with a woman who forced me to talk her through the entire yard sale. “And over here we have a set of old magazines,” I’d say. She’d poke at them, look confused and ask, “How much?” When I told her the price she would say, “Sooooollllldd,” as if announcing a game show. After showing her roughly 400 items and hearing her say, “Sooooolllldd,” 400 times she proceeded to purchase a bucket she insisted looked like an owl and nothing more.
As the afternoon came to a close, the flow of desperate garbage pickers…I mean customers, slowed to a trickle and I had a lot of time to stare at my old stuff that had meant a lot to me, but meant nothing to anyone else. I thought about the past year and how eager I was to depart from the rest of my life to exhibit how many new experiences I had had.
The one thing that had remained consistent between those times was my girlfriend, who had just arrived with her mother as a courtesy. As her mother looked around at the scattered remnants of the yard sale, I told my girlfriend about the guy who bought the tiny table, the girl who walked away from a dinette set because I refused to mark it down to a dollar and the woman who was Soooolllddd on everything.
I told her the yard sale felt like it had been a waste. I was angry with myself for thinking I’d feel better the further I got from everything I’d once known. I’d take the money I’d made on that day and probably spend it over the course of a month on cheap beer. Cheap beer for memories.
My girlfriend went inside to use the bathroom and I continued to regret how eager I was to run away from everything I’d known. As I was pouting, my girlfriend’s mother came up to me. “This is so charming,” she said. “I’ll take it.” She was holding my parent’s spaghetti statue.
I quickly took her money to confirm the sale. “Your daughter always loved this statue,” I said as I wrapped the piece in newspaper and put it into a plastic bag. “Maybe you should give it to her for her birthday.”
The somber feeling of having turned my back on everything that had once been important, interesting or useful quickly washed away as I imagined my girlfriend’s face upon receiving the statue as a gift. She’d roll her eyes, want to make a comment on how trashy the statue was before realizing that she couldn’t without insulting her own family. Somewhere in the distance, I’d be laughing.
It was then that I realized no matter where the objects I had defended, embraced and desired ended up, they would always carry a part of me wherever they went – No matter how much I pushed them away or pulled other things towards me. I grabbed a box, wrote free on the side and began putting whatever could fit inside it. Perhaps my old shoes couldn’t be appreciated for $.15, but I knew someone would find them and be glad they did.
