Rummage sale memories

Rummage sale memories
By Aaron J. Brown

We joined in a rummage sale with some friends last week. We’ve learned some things about organizing rummage sales over the years. Be ready for early birds. The traffic drops off around 2 p.m. Price to sell. Use your identified price tags to divvy up the booty at the end of a shared sale.

But I wasn’t prepared for the lesson I learned last weekend. Be prepared to see strangers buy the itty bitty baby clothes once worn by your precious little children. Strangers! They’ll probably take them home and wipe grease with them, or decoupage NASCAR logos on them, or who knows what. Strangers! That’s the shirt Dougie wore to his first Christmas. That’s what Georgie wore in the picture hanging on our wall. Stranger, who are you and what gives you the right? Oh, yeah. The price tag. It’s a rummage sale. That’s right.

It’s not manly, or Iron Rangerly, to admit these feelings, so don’t. Unless you have a newspaper column. I’ll take the heat for all of us. That’s what I’m “paid” for. It was hard watching all those baby clothes go into the rummage sale pile. They had to go, I admit. We can’t keep everything, and we made good use of rummage sales in clothing the three young boys in our household, so this was really just the way it all works.

But that’s one thing about rummage sales. There is a vast, emotional chasm between the front and back of the checkout table. For sellers, their unused stuff – once deemed valuable – faces its judgment day. For the buyers, it’s all about judgment.

“Can you believe they’d charge $5 for this?”

“Oh, look. Someone apparently thought Vanilla Ice was pretty cool. Ha-ha.”

Yes, I’ve spent plenty of time on that side of the rummage sale aisle. But I wasn’t ready to see my stuff judged by the same standards.

A couple years ago our VCR died. It was old and its time had come. That’s when we learned that you can’t buy VCRs anymore. Not new, at normal stores, anyway. So after two years of collecting dust, we decided to sell all the old VHS tapes. We were purging the technology, see, not the content on the tapes.

Invariably, this meant selling tapes once deemed – again – “precious.” I begrudgingly stuck 25 or 50 cent stickers on “Citizen Kane,” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” and my whole collection of “X-Files” episodes. I even included my “Best of Johnny Carson” and “Late Night with David Letterman” tapes that I watched again and again as a teenager, right before falling asleep after school so I could wake up in time to work overnights as a disk jockey at an Iron Range radio station.

25 cents! Proportionally, this would put the value of my entire existence somewhere in the neighborhood of $128.50. That’s not bad for a rummage sale, but we’re talking about my life here.

Naturally, I was again attaching excessive emotional meaning to the situation. Without a VCR, or the prospect of VCRs ever re-entering the public marketplace, I would never again be able to watch these tapes anyway. But there they were, on sale, being browsed by strangers.

In the end, rummage sale Darwinism played out exactly as any objective observer would have predicted. Popular products priced affordably sold easily. All of the quality baby clothes worn by my kids sold quickly to grateful new parents. The kid videos in our sale sold like hot cakes; meantime, “The Man Who Knew Too Much” remains in our garage, ready for the next sale (25 cents, people! You can’t beat that deal!).

Watching this commerce take place, I realize that stuff is just that, stuff. You can sell this stuff for 25 cents, maybe a dollar if it’s a cute outfit for baby boys, but there is no earthly value on the human memories behind it. That is not for sale.

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