The Five People You Meet At A Yard Sale
"Would you take forty-eight cents for it?"
The sense of half-normalcy we’ve rediscovered in this country in the second half of 2021 has brought with it the welcome return of many things that were sorely lacking and deeply missed in 2020: family gatherings, civic fireworks displays, bustling restaurants and bars and roaring crowds at NBA Finals games.
Of course, with the good comes the bad, and some things that I wasn’t terribly sorry to be missing out on are back, too.
To wit: this weekend, my neighborhood held its annual yard sale.
I will be completely candid about the role I played in the lead-up to this event: I was a whiny butt about it. I do not care for yard sales, especially when my involvement is measured in hours behind the table rather than minutes passing in front of it. I noted, I thought quite reasonably, that there was no way we would reap enough money from it to make it anywhere close to worth our time. I offered, I thought helpfully, that there were a number of other, better ways we could spend a Saturday mornin…