Garage Sales Tales

We sold more of our crap today, but it was different than last time. The professionals didn’t show up this morning. I think it’s the economy. It’s a lot harder right now to flip stuff for a profit quickly, so all we had were people who thought they could find a bargain on something they actually wanted. However, they showed up late. We were only going to be out there from 8 until 11, and almost nothing sold before 9:30. We were starting to panic when a couple people wanted our stove, water heater, washer, and dryer. We made about two thirds of our money in five minutes. The rest of the sale was us basically begging people to take away our garbage because we didn’t want to have to bring it back inside. We got to know some neighbors a little bit better. I don’t know their names but they live on the corner across the street. All I know about them is that the mom and dad both play for the Jacksonville Symphony, they have two cute kids, and they want way too much for their house. Anyway the little boy, who can’t be more than three, saw that a yard sale was going on and dragged his dad and his sister over to check it out. His sister is seven or eight and she was the best associate we had on the sales floor. She was mostly convincing her dad to buy stuff, but sales is about scoreboard and nothing else. I was talking to the little boy who was telling me about his two dinosaurs, Superman and Black Spiderman. “Black Spiderman” caught dad’s ear, and he started explaining to me, the large Negro, how they’d been watching Spiderman 3 and Spiderman has a “black” costume. I had to slam on my mental brakes and try to figure out why the dad was explaining all this to me because I was figuring out the best way of summarizing the last twenty-five years of Spiderman for the youngster and the significance of the Symbiote. Race relations in this country are funny.