'This Situation, This Neighborly Implosion'

On Saturday we took part in a collective cul-de-sac yard sale. Our stub of a street was turned for half the day into an open-air bazaar. We set up tables and stacked them with once-precious, ready-to-discard suburban detritus – coffee mugs, wineglasses, old stereo speakers, DVDs, candles, skillets, cookbooks, a rolling pin, a wicker basket, watercolors we never wanted. I like the U.K. expression for such events – jumble sales. A much-concealed part of me enjoys retail, the banter, the give and take of haggling. I was more interested in unloading stuff than in gouging customers. In “Garage Sale” from Adult Bookstore (1976), Karl Shapiro writes:

“This situation, this neighborly implosion,

As flat as the wallpaper of Matisse

Strikes one as a cultural masterpiece.

In this scene nothing serious can go wrong.”

And he’s right. No one drives away unhappy. No one steals anything. No one is cheated. One neighbor baked cookies and gave them away. I’m happy when someone is pleased to carry away something we never wanted in the first place. The customers formed a fair sample of Houston demographics -- predominantly Hispanic, some blacks, fewer whites. An elderly Mexican woman began speaking to me in Spanish and I heard frío. “Si, brrrr,” I said, shivering and almost exhausting my Spanish. She nodded. There’s a subdued sadness about yard sales, the passing of goods that should have been more precious to us. Tom Disch turns a “Garage Sale” (Dark Verses & Light, 1991) into a memento mori:

“Once someone thought he’d want to read this book,

And here’s a chess set minus just one rook;

A Sunbeam toaster sans its cord; the Life

Of Who’s-It by his unforgiving wife.

Como singing `Dance, Ballerina, Dance’;

The buttons off a hundred shirts and pants;

A rug unfaded where a bed has been

With traffic patterns marked in olive green.

There are few takers, though the prices cry,

`Remember, stranger, someday you must die.’”