https://medium.com/@philgarber/blog

0905blog

Bargains Galore

My neighbor took a page out of the garage sale playbook by having his neighbors park their cars on the street outside his home to make it look like a crowd had descended to be the first to scarf up the treasured blender.

The plan, however, could backfire for those who adhere to the old, trusted and true Yogi adage that “nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”

I walked by the neighbor’s house at the start of my morning walk that was interrupted when I arrived along the trail that follows the Musconetcong River and suddenly, turning a bend, came upon two large black bears ambling in front of me on the trail. I stopped in my tracks and so did one of the big bears who stared at me as I started back-pedaling slowly so as not to anger this very large bear that certainly had big teeth and claws. The bears left and I left and all were happy.

But back to the garage sale. I saw one brown-haired, middle-age woman who was wearing a Trump-Pence 2020 cap and a protective mask and had tattoo sleeves on both arms though I was too far away to get a good look at them, but I was curious. She was picking up items from the series of long tables my neighbor had set up and scrutinizing them before placing them back on the table while my neighbor hovered in the near background ready to take in the loot. The tables included old lamps, Scrabble and Monopoly games, some hardcover books, plates and silverware and lots of other assorted odds and ends.

If another bona fide garage sale junkie arrived and saw just one other shopper, he might wonder what’s with all the cars and think it was just a setup taken from the garage sale playbook. It’s simply remedied by telling the new shopper that the others are inside using the bathrooms.

So what does this have to do with Trump? Absolutely zilch as I vow not to offer any space to the bigoted, xenophobic, ignorant, would-be fascist, womanizing, lying, Putin-loving, egotistical, big-butted turd with no pets even once, at least today.

On to more important things.

I think people enjoy the social aspect of garage sales, meeting and chatting with potential buyers but there is definitely an emotional edge to selling the GI Joe doll that your kid used when he was small and knowing now that it’s of no use to you or your 25-year-old son any more. So you let it go for 50 cents, only to kick yourself later that night when a friend tells you that old GI Joes are valuable collectibles. From what I have seen, people don’t go to garage sales to socialize but are focused on finding that hidden gem and moving on to the next sale on their list for the day.

I’ve never gotten into garage sales but I do know people who live for them and devote every weekend to garage sale hopping, hunting for bargains that they can re-sell at their own garage sales or possibly re-gift for Christmas. I suppose people do find some good deals, like GI Joe dolls, but I think mostly it’s just used junk that people look at later and say to their spouse, “Why on earth did we buy that?” To which the spouse replies, making really no sense, “because it only cost a dollar.”

It wasn’t that way at Frankie’s Market, the late, great flea market on Route 17 in Paramus that was situated on one of the most valuable pieces of land, being a stone’s throw from the George Washington Bridge. That was in the early 1960s and now it’s the site of a giant office building.

I used to go there with my mother on Saturday mornings. She would browse around what must have been a few acres of flea market flotsam buying a frying pan or something while I made a bee-line straight to the comic books. They had really great, used, comics for sale and I was in heaven paging through the old Superman, Batman, The Flash and even Archie comics. I loved them all and my mother would usually buy one or two for me and I would spend the afternoon sprawled on my bed back home, reading them cover to cover.

Sometimes I would pester my mother to buy the old Mr. Potato Head game that used real and not plastic potatoes or the Davy Crockett coonskin hat with the real, coonskin tale, or at least that’s what the label said. There were actually times when I picked up a few baseball cards to add to my collection that I kept in a shoe box, that my mother later threw away, but that was rare. My mother tossing my card collection wan’t rare but leaving Frankie’s Market with a vintage Gil McDougald card, was.

Usually I would leave with only a few comics because my mother said to choose between a comic book and a potato head game or a baseball card and I always chose the comic book.

We have had a few garage sales at my house. We made maybe $20 at each sale but at least we were able to get rid of those old cross country skis, the extra window air conditioner, the old Windows computer and the Herman Wouk books that we never got to read and even that mechanical device that I have no idea what it was for and was still in its original box . We would sell things like a plastic saucer that kids ride in the snow marked for a dollar and people would ask if we’d let it go for 50 cents which we agreed to without much bargaining, happy just to free up space in the garage to fill with future items we had no need for.

Neighborhood garage sales pale in the glory and stature of huge flea markets like Frankie’s Market, truly a relic of a past when things were less complicated, lives were lived a bit more slowly and kids liked toys that taxed their imaginations and didn’t cost a fortune. And I still don’t know who Frankie was.

I’ll get back to bone spurs tomorrow.