Garage Sale

Garage Sale

P.J. McKay

Jake loved to go garage saling, it was one of the few things he still really enjoyed. He didn’t work at it like a lot of the people did. He never set the alarm to get up early to be sure he was the first person to see the stuff. He never went the night before like some did to try to get a jump on the rest of the buyers. Jake knew these people had a big advantage, he knew if he did it he would do much better finding those elusive treasures he seeked. It just seemed like work to him, and he was afraid if it became work it would no longer be fun, and Jake was not willing to risk that.

It’s not that he resented the people that did it that way. He even called them “The Professionals”. Sure he wished they would just chill out a bit so he would do better, but he understood being efficient, knowing the angles and taking advantage of them. He was that way in some things himself, even in some things he still enjoyed. He understood them, respected them, and even pittied them a bit, and the satisfaction he felt when he found a treasure after they had been through an area just made the find that much better. Like the WW ll Navy flashlight he found last week for a dollar and he ended up selling on ebay for a hundred. Boy did they miss one there, or the ukulele he got over two hundred for. Knowing the professionals had missed these and many others gave Jake the best high.

He woke up kinda slow on Saturday morning, he could tell by the sun coming in the sides of his bedroom blinds that is was late. “Well no need to rush, I’ve already missed the easy sales” he thought to himself, and he may have laid there in bed a while if he hadn’t needed to use the bathroom. So he did his business, then got dressed. Walked out and got the newspaper. What a fine day. It was June and it had been very hot the week before but a cold front had passed through with some rain and the past couple of mornings had been great. Cool enough to need a jacket if you were just standing around, but he knew he would be in shirt sleeves because he was going to one of those neighborhood sales. Where all the people in an area of town would agree to have a garage sale on the same day. He would be doing some walking.

These sales were great for everyone buyers and sellers alike. It was even good for the people in those areas that hated garage sales because this way you got it all over with at one time. The neighborhood would be overrun with all these people walking through your grass, leaving soda bottles on the curb, flipping cigarettes butts everywhere, but then it was over. One day and it was over, and then you could count on a couple of months before a stray one or two sales would start popping up again. You didn’t have to like it, but if you had to put up with these garage sales, this was probably the best way.

Jake grabbed a bottle of water from the frig and went to the garage and got in the car. It was getting to be more like work getting in and out of his car. He was getting old. As he was pulling out of the garage and driving to the sale he was thinking of when he was a young kid and he would not even give it a thought when he jumped in or out of the low sports car he once owned. He was young then with energy just waiting to be burned. He knew when his mid-life crisis hit, it would not include a sports car. He was thinking maybe one of those little pick-up trucks, or even (he cringed at even thinking it) a mini-van. Something to step up into and let gravity help him out of. Thank goodness he didn’t have to think about it long, he started seeing the signs for the sales. Fluorescent green, orange, and pink , balloons, cardboard, tinsel, the works. Cars, mini-van, pick-ups lined the streets. Jake was starting to feel the feeling. Wondering how he would do with this challenge, every item had to have been looked at by a hundred people by now, probably more. Could he find a treasure? Sure he would, he always did. What would it be? That was the fun thing. What would it be?

Jake found a parking spot just a short way down the first side street he went down. This was going to be a tough one. This was a newer sub-division with single story ranch style homes with attached garages. Starter homes the real estate people called them. Probably lots of baby clothes, toys, broken bicycles. Jake also knew these homes were perfect for retired older folks because there were no steps in the house. With older folks come older items which was always a good thing in this game.

He quickly, instinctively chose his route, and made his way up and down the street. He always had a nice smile for the people as he walked up to the garage, always asked how business was and maybe another comment or two. But then it was all business. He didn’t even notice people except to avoid bumping into them. He could be standing next to his father, son, or someone he knew very well and he would not know it unless they said something to him. Most things only took a glance to be eliminated as a target, some had to be studied closely. Some garages were finished in 15 seconds, some took as long as 15 minutes. He picked up an item here, and another there, nothing too exciting. Then he found one. It was a book he was sure would pay for his gas, his lunch and supper, and any items he bought today, plus a nice profit. He was flying high. His hands were full but he only had a few more houses to go before he started back to the car. He asked the lady he had bought the last items from if he could leave all his stuff there and pick it up in his car. She said that was fine so he put his bags under an old beach towel, out of the way and headed out. He would finish out this street, go back and get the car, pick up his stuff, and drive over to the next street.

The next house had the garage door closed, but at the end of the driveway there was a big gaggle of gallon jugs. Jake knew gaggle was not the right word for it, but it somehow seemed right. The white gallon jugs all sitting there together somehow reminded him of a gaggle of snow geese. Probably it was the color, maybe it was something about the shapes. Who knows, who can explain how a persons mind works sometimes. People were walking past them, slowing, looking, and kept on going. As Jake walked up to them he noticed a sign that said in big black letters on a piece of pure white cardboard the word Free, printed neatly in a sure steady hand. He stopped and picked up a jug and putting on his reading glasses he had on a lanyard around his neck, began to read the label. It was laundry soap. Here was someone giving away gallons and gallons of laundry soap and people were just walking by. Jake looked up and took a long look at the house. It looked like a normal house, neat and clean, but not overly neat and clean. Just a normal house, nothing to set it apart from most of the other houses on that street. Then there was a flash in his mind. Like in the cartoons when they show the little light bulb above a persons head, well it had just happened to him. He not only knew why the soap was free, he knew about the person inside the house. If you had lined up ten random people with the person inside this house among them, he would bet you $100, no $1000, no he would bet you ten thousand dollars he could pick the person who lived in this house, and even give you some pretty good odds.

His first thought was to go get his car and pack it full of these jugs, but somehow that just didn’t seem right. Even going to get the car and driving it up and putting in a big arm load wouldn’t do. For some reason he felt like he could only take what he could carry back to his car. So he put the fingers of each of his hands through three of the handles and lifted to check the weight. It was heavy, too heavy to carry all the way back to the car unless he stopped to rest along the way, which he could not, and would not do. He put one jug down and took off walking for the car. This would be a test for him. He only got a couple houses down before his arms were aching. He switched the third jug in his right hand to his left to give the right a break, then switched it back. He did this a total of 5 times before he got back to the car, but he had passed the test, he never put them down to rest. His arms were on fire, at about half way he come up on a group of slow moving garage salers and knew he was in trouble, but he cut between two parked cars and went on out in the street. He told him self he was nuts, he could put the jugs down, go get the car and then pick them up. He never slowed down, and when he finally reached the car and put down the jugs to open the door he could only curse himself, both for the relief he felt and his childish stubbornness. Opening the door was no easy task. His fingers were so numb it was like trying to lift the latch with a meat hook. He got the door opened, and the back seat loaded up and got himself in behind the steering wheel.. He just sat there. He was weak and tired and sore, but he felt good. He thought to himself “I feel atwitter” and he chuckled out loud. Yea right, atwitter, where did that come from? What the hell was atwitter anyway? He figured he must have heard the word on the radio on the way over here, or maybe he heard someone say it some time during the morning, he didn’t know and really didn’t care. It was now giving him a nice little laugh and taking his mind off the pain, so he said it a couple more times.

During his little joke to himself, Jake had been flexing his fingers to get the feeling back in them and now he was ready to go. He went down to the end of the street, just past the house with the jugs in the driveway and parked the car. He got out of the car and walked up past the jugs and to the house to get the bags of stuff he had left. He went past the jugs again and was tempted, he could easily have carried 3 more jugs with the bags for the short distance to his car, but he didn’t. He went to the car and dropped off the bags. Then he went to the last three sales on that street, got back in the car and just watched the people and the jugs. He had been watching them since he parked the car.

Most people just past by. Some would pick up a jug, read the label, look at the house, ask each other why they were free, put the jug down and were on their way. One young mother in tight, tight jeans put a jug in the back of the baby stroller she was pushing. A group of 6 thirty something women talked each other into taking a jug. One got about ten steps and turned around and put hers back.

The jugs were going slowly, but they were going. That made Jake happy. He felt happy for the person in the house. He started up the car and headed for the next street.

It was about noon when Jake finished up with the sales. He had found some good things, nothing great, but some good things. One thing he found that he was excited about was an Ambassadeur fishing reel. He was excited because he liked to take these reels apart, fix them and clean them up. This one was a mess. It was as filthy a reel as he had ever seen and something was wrong on the inside because it would not reel in the line. This was a high quality, well built reel, and normally it would be gone very early in a garage sale. It was obvious why this one was still not sold. It would take hours to clean it properly and most buyers wouldn’t know how to fix the problem with the reel. Jake put the reel back down and went on looking at the rest of the items. This was a nice garage sale. It had a couple of good size maple trees up towards the house that made it nice and cool. It was the sale of an old lady and there was a nice mix of unusual items. Jake decided to make this his last sale for the day.

The last sale of the day was always kinda special to him. He would drop the hunting mode and look and talk to the people. He would look at items he normally would not look at. He would look at items longer then he would normally look at them. He would make it last as long as he could.

This was a good last sale of the day. Jake talked to the old lady. They talked about some of the items. They talked about her husband who had died the winter before. They talked about her car, her yard, her house. Yes, this was a very good last sale of the day.

Jake liked the lady, he liked talking to her. He got to thinking about the fishing reel. He figured the lady would just end up throwing it away if it didn’t sell and that would not be right in Jake’s mind. It was too good a reel. It could be brought back to useful condition. It was getting late in the day and the traffic was very slow. Jake was probably the last chance for this reel. He had worked on dozens of these reels, he was pretty sure he could get this one working. He weighed it out in his mind but could not get the scales to tip in favor of the reel, it was just too much work.

Going back over to the lady, he brought up the subject of fishing. The lady perked up like a switch had been turned on. She talked about how much her husband had enjoyed fishing, talked about the times their family had had fishing, talked about her good memories of their time at the lake. Told Jake how she wished she could go back and do it all over again. Jake knew exactly how she felt. Jake bought the reel, he didn’t ask for a lower price he just gave her the money, thanked her, wished her good luck with her sale, and walked back to the car.

Back in the car Jake was thinking about the soap. He thought about going back past the house, it was only a couple of blocks out of his way. But he knew even if there were still jugs there, he would not take them. He was curious though, could there still be some there? He thought he would go past and if there were still some jugs there he would stop and park and watch. It was so strange to him that people, especially garage salers, would pass up on free soap. He decided not to but he kept thinking about the soap, no, that’s not quite right, he kept thinking about the people not taking the soap. He knew why he had taken the soap, it was because he had figured it out, he had solved the puzzle. Did the other people that took the soap also solve the puzzle? Did it have to be figured out before a person could take the soap? He doubted that was the case, he doubted the young mother in the tight jeans had even tried to figure it out. Still, it fascinated him. He tried to think back to what he was thinking as he held the jug and was looking at the house before the flash. He was thinking “What’s the catch here?” …… “This is too good to be true”. Was that enough to stop him from taking the soap? He didn’t think so but there was no way to be sure.

Maybe if he went through the puzzle piece by piece he could get an answer. The soap was in nice clean white gallon jugs, they all had the labels on with the brand name on them. The brand name was from a water softener company. Jake remembered years before a young guy had come to the house to test his water and to sell him a softener to condition his water. He remembered that as part of the sales pitch the salesman offered free soap for a year or two or five, he could not remember how long. Jake had not bought the softener because he knew his water was soft, maybe not as soft as it could be, but he had used well water for years in his younger days and he knew his water now was not even close to that, so he didn’t see a big advantage in getting a softener, but he knew the people in the house had bought one. He knew the people in the house did not like the soap so that is why they were giving it away. But why didn’t they like the soap? It was good soap and with the soft water practically any soap would work. It was because the people in the house had used the same soap for years, they were branded, they weren’t going to change their brand of soap. That plus it being a ranch home would make them older folks. Yes, they had to be older but not too old. They were not people who had lived through the great depression. Jake knew about people that had lived through the depression. He had worked in a restaurant one summer as a kid and he remembered the waitresses always complaining about the people who had been through the depression being so tight with their tips. No, people that had lived through that would not be giving away perfectly good soap.

It must be a woman in the house, not that a man can’t be branded. If it had been jugs of motor oil at the end of the driveway, he would have though it was a man, but it was soap. A man would use any soap. A man would use laundry soap in the dishwasher, in the bath, to mop the floor. To a man soap was soap. Yes, it had to be a woman in the house.

So far Jake knew it was a woman between 65 and 75 in the house, what else did he know about her? He figured she didn’t like garage sales or she would have sold the soap for a couple of bucks a jug. She was smart, she knew the neighborhood would be full of people looking for a bargain and she used that to get rid of the soap. She was healthy, she gotten all those jugs to the end of her driveway, and the writing on the sign showed a steady hand. All of her friends had either gone or were branded too, or she would have given the soap to them. And of course he knew she had a water softener.

The most amazing thing, Jake thought, is that it all happened in a split second. Did he think all this standing there with the jug in his hand? He must have, because he knew the woman in the house as he stood there. He didn’t remember thinking it, but he must have. How else would he have known?

Pulling into his driveway distracted him and he had to let it all go. He pulled into the garage and unloaded everything and put it where he wanted it all. He got his two teenage sons and took them out to eat lunch. The rest of the day he was busy with the boys. After supper he remembered about the soap. He went in to do a load of wash. As he started filling the washer with water and added the soap he started to think again about the lady in the house and the soap. He started up again with all he knew about the lady, but decided he knew her well enough. Now he wanted to figure out why so many people would pass up the soap. Probably a lot of them did not recognize the brand of the soap, not that they were all branded, he thought, but because they had never heard of this brand. Then he stopped short, he had another flash. Not like the one earlier but a flash none the less.

Jake looked down at the five gallons of soap and said to himself “Its going to take a long time to use all this soap and if every time I do a load of wash I think about it I will probably get it all figured out. Or I can think about what a good day I had and how happy I am to have gotten all this free soap and I can have a good thought for the lady in the house and feel good while doing laundry. Its just a matter of choice.”