Yard sale

"OK, Alex. We'll take twenty for the antlers and ten for the hat."

The antlers in question were mounted to a block of wood, and sat atop a pile of t-shirts.* The hat was in Alex's hand, a gray fedora which he turned to peer at from different angles.

I was just walking by, affiliated with neither Alex nor the woman with the dyed red hair who was presiding over the collection of cast-offs along the sidewalk. This was just another neighborhood yard sale that I happened upon during my weekend wandering. I would not have even known Alex's name had the woman not used it.

I had seen perhaps a half dozen of these sales in the hour or two I was walking around. Coming across a yard sale has always been something I enjoy, like finding that a thrift store has unexpectedly materialized in the middle of a residential block. I like to look at the things people have selected for themselves and then decided they no longer had a use for.

On one of the last truly nice weekends of the season, they had bloomed like late summer flowers all over the place. I took a note of the impromptu signs taped to streetlights and stop signs at nearly every intersection and adjusted my walk to take in as many as I could.

The signs for these events are nearly always misleading. One told of a "Huge Family Yard Sale - Something for everyone!!!," but contained nothing but cast-off clothing items, some of which had clearly been bought in bulk from a discontinued uniform company. Another, which had also promised a wide array of items, did not exist at all. Instead of the tantilizing promised books, records and furniture, I found a small piece of paper taped to a door. A shaky hand had written "No Yard Sale Today." A third, which did not list a location and which I never found, promised a "Yar Sale," which I can only assume meant that they were selling off equipment used in piracy.

As I was passing Alex and his haggling opponent, I was starting to get sick of yard sales in general. I'm glad that they still exist in our eBay-obsessed world, but the amount of miscellaneous crap was becoming wearying. And this was one of the sales where the person who organized it clearly thought of herself as an entrepreneur. A box of pins from the 2006 Olympics sat in the sun with a sign explaining that you would find these for $6.95 anywhere else, but here they were only $4.00.

This made me a little irritable. I sort of hate the assumption that the original price of an item has any relevance once it is sitting for sale on someone's lawn. Maybe this would have been a good deal if I were some sort of collector of Olympics memorabilia, but I doubt it. And if I were such a creature, the 2006 Olympics were recent enough that I would doubtless have already added these items to my collection elsewhere.

"Sir! Sir! This hat!" Alex seized my arm as I attempted to pass. He spoke with a Slavic accent, which is not at all uncommon in this neighborhood.

"This hat," he repeated. "What do you think?"

He thrust the fedora at me. "Uh, a fine hat," I said.

"Yes. But what? Five Dollars?"

"A hundred, easily, in a store," the woman countered.

Alex rotated the hat again, inspecting it and clearly expecting me to do the same.

"Is fine. Yes. In good shape, but I think maybe needs some cleaning, yes?" He made a show of pretending to brush some dust off the brim.

"In a store, a hundred," the woman repeated.

"Well, this is a yard sale," I said slowly. "The original price does become sort of irrelevant." I was torn between my desire to flee and the fact that the woman was giving me a perfect opportunity to vent my displeasure at her pricing method.

Alex made a triumphant crowing sound, raising the hat into the air.

"Well, he's not the one selling it," the woman countered, casting a baleful glance at me.

"True enough," I said, freeing myself from the conversation and resuming my walk. I was no longer the unwitting accomplice of amateur hagglers, and that felt nice.


*A note about the antlers: I do not personally think it's cool to kill something and take a trophy. I am consistent in this belief. I don't like it when serial killers do it, either. Just so you know.