What am I offered for a man’s oxford shoe? Size nine-and-half, triple E and bronzed in the style of a baby bootie?
It was a going-away present given to me as a joke years ago and I have long treasured it. But as with so many treasures, no one else seems to want it, even though it makes a swell paperweight or doorstop.
What am I offered? Nothing.
Or what could I get for my “Herbie for the Derby” T-shirt?
This is a rarity; years ago my girlfriend’s mother sewed the slogan on a T-shirt because she had entered her dog, Herbie, in theToronto Star dog derby — a series of swim races at the Canadian National Exhibition. Herbie would swim, the owner would sit in the back of a rowboat and encourage him and I, in my T-shirt, would row.
All went well until Herbie was tossed into the water, ignored us and decided he would swim to Rochester. His owner gave up on him and the judges disqualified us. But the T-shirt lives on.
One of a kind. A piece of history.
What am I offered? Nothing.
Or how about books — old textbooks barely used, selections from the Book of the Month club and mysteries going as far back as E. Phillips Oppenheim. A few of these I have actually been able to sell at about one-twentieth of their original price. Which means they just pay for the gas I use driving them to the booksellers. Other books we have disposed of at night by pushing them through book return slots at unsuspecting libraries.
And so it goes with most of our possessions, for one person’s treasure is another’s junk.
As you might guess, we have been cleaning out the basement and finding that what we have stored away over the years is a drag on the market.
Take our collection of shutters, for example. Many of them we bought at garage sales with a view to putting them on windows, only to find they didn’t quite fit. Yet they were too good to throw out.
And some of our shutters we scavenged from others’ garbage when we lived in the poor part of Toronto’s tony Rosedale district and wrongly assumed rich people could afford to throw out good stuff. (We were too naïve to realize that rich people were rich precisely because they held onto the good stuff.)
Now that we go over our hoard, we know that the shutters will never fit and so it is time to part company. Except nobody wants to buy them.
Indeed, no one really wants to buy anything that we no longer need. That includes: suitcases, light fixtures, picture frames and a selection of two-by-fours, quarter-round, moulding and odd sizes of plywood. And three bags of cement.
Everything that we are now trying to dispose of once had value and certainly would still have a use if it could only find a good home. And that is why God invented the end of the driveway.
Our personal driveway empties onto a back road about 250 yards away from the house and is partially hidden from us. Which is good because it means people coming by can pull over and pick things over in relative privacy.
So starting this spring, we set up a table at the end of the drive and made a couple of big signs saying: “Free.” Then we started laying out possessions and in a couple of days people started picking them up.
Yes, someone took the shutters. We also moved several small but rickety tables and one perfectly good sofa. We moved several hundred books, picture frames, strings of Christmas lights, old curtain poles, cookware and two boxes of electrical hardware that I had owned for 30 years. I kept it in the hope that I might some day figure out what it was all for. Some hope.
The big advantage to the end of the drive is that all your unwanted possessions vanish. The disadvantage is that you can never go to another garage sale because you would be in danger of buying them back. IE
Finding a good home for old friends
- By: Paul Rush
- October 1, 2008 October 29, 2019
- 12:29
Paul Rush
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