AARP The Magazine - July/August 2009

Yard Sale!

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The article didn’t specify what price the man paid for it, but I’m sure it was a good bit less than the $500,000 or so for which it’s since been appraised.

Perhaps the most legendary yard sale of all time took place in 1882, although it is almost entirely forgotten today. When President James Garfield was assassinated in 1881, his vice president, Chester Alan Arthur, moved up to the White House. But he refused to move into the White House, which was, it seems, showing its age, with rotting pipes and crumbling walls. After some dithering, Congress gave in to Arthur’s demands and appropriated funds for what was, in essence, a gut renovation. As part of the process, the President went through every room in the house and tossed out things the previous occupants, and their families, had left behind. And there was a lot of it. Mixed in among items of dubious worth— spittoons, lamps, rat traps—were carpets and chandeliers, furniture once used by James Monroe and Andrew Jackson, a ratty old hat that had graced the head of John Quincy Adams, a pair of Abraham Lincoln’s pants. One of the more unusual items was a sideboard presented to First Lady (and noted teetotaler) Lucy Hayes by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in gratitude for her refusal to serve liquor in the White House. Arthur had it carted away with the rest of the stuff, 24 wag-onsful, and sold off every last bit of it to the public. One of the most eager buyers was Lucy Hayes’s husband, Rutherford B., who is said to have snapped up enough furniture to outfit his retirement home in Ohio. He didn’t get the sideboard, though; that went to a local saloonkeeper, who reportedly displayed it prominently in his establishment, well stocked with spirits, for years afterward. And you thought you were clever for converting that old wooden tool chest into a jewelry box.

NO MATTER WHO you are, the most memorable yard sale you will ever attend is likely the one you host your-

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self. Here generalizations are useless. Some people decide to hold them on the spur of the moment, while others plan them years in advance. There are people who have them annually, or even semiannually, while most of us will do so only once or twice. No matter how you plan it and throw it, though, and no matter how poorly or well it goes, your yard sale will be a very strange event, at least for you.

I speak from experience, sort of. Some years ago my parents sold the house in which I grew up, and in doing so ended its utility as a free storage facility for the personal effects of my childhood. I went through and picked out some things I wanted to keep, but in a rare fit of pragmatism, fueled at least in part by a severe shortage of space, I decided they could just sell off the rest of it: baseball cards and comics, records and cassettes, snow globes and foreign soda bottles, Peanuts books and Matchbox cars, an Etch A Sketch and an Erector Set; things, in other words, that had once been very important to me but that I now regarded as nothing more than curious artifacts of a distant time.

At least, that is, until total strangers started to paw through them. How dare these people carelessly manhandle the treasures of my youth! Picking them up and putting them back down, scrutinizing every crack and crevice for fault, even—I can barely stand to write this—implying, with a counteroffer, that the price was too high! How on earth could any price be too high for these treasures? How could they even conceive of taking them home and giving them to their own children, or even using them themselves? What could they possibly have been thinking?

In fact, I knew quite well what they were thinking: This is neat. That’s pretty nice. I haven’t seen one of those in forever. You know, I think I could probably use this when I travel. And I’m fairly sure that thing is actually worth a few hundred dollars, at least. Better hang on to it. Who’d have thought I’d find one of those at a yard sale?

Well, they did, of course; that’s why
they came. And I’d thought so, too,
every Saturday morning I’d awakened
earlier than I would have otherwise,
climbed onto my bike or into my car,
and set off in search of homemade
cardboard signs directing me to this
house or that. I still do. It’s not even, in
the end, about the stuff; although we
love good stuff, what we really love,
what keeps us going to yard sales week
after week after month after year, is the
pure joy of finding it all so serendipi-
tously. That’s why, despite numerous
predictions to the contrary, websites
such as CraigsList and eBay have not
killed yard sales, will never kill them.
CraigsList and eBay are where you go
to find something you want; yard sales
are where you go to find something
you didn’t know you wanted. They’re
where you go when you want stuff to
find you. In a world where so little is
left to chance anymore, and where
what is can be a source of great and ter-
rible anxiety, yard sales remind us that,
occasionally, something delightful can
still just fall on you like the rain.

Carolyn
I really don’t believe you need this to
add to your fund of knowledge but
Billie

I don’t need it either, but I think I’ll hang on to it for a while, anyway. At least until I have my own yard sale, at which point you’re welcome to come by and make an offer. No early birds. ;