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Mr. Alexander.
GARAGE SAILS AND BOY SCOUTS
AND,
WHYEVER NOT.....??
OK, so we gotta coupla problems here...
First and foremost - I love to go garage sailing,
feeling the wind in my hair on a fine spring morning as I tack gracefully from one sale to another, docking in a dozen different driveways.... (and blocking several others as necessity, opportunity and laziness dictate.)
It's a great life on a boring Saturday morning, like whalers..
navigators high in the crows nest next to me,
keeping eyes wide for the tell tale neon colors,
tacked to yellophone poles and stuck impudently,
like tiny grave markers
in the corners of lawns of strangers,
whose only crime was to build too close to the intersection
of major street and minor.
"Thar she blows.." rises the cry,
and the search is afoot..
bobbing and weaving through the maze of drives and avenues..
circles and terraces..
tracking the wild bargains
at the bazaar of the bizarre.
We make side bets on how many toasters one can see
in a day..
how many abused curling irons...
and flat irons
and ionizers, unused and in the box.
If we find just one piece of unidentified flotsam,
one strange and alien Jetson-esque jetsam...
then our day is complete...
It goes in with the prizes for next xmas'
white elephant game...
But it must be less than two dollars,
and it's purpose, use and functionality
must be as much a mystery to it's seller as it is to us.
These finds are, of course,
as rare as white whales...
but what wonderous tricks of natural civilization they are
when they first appear on the horizon..
"there, over there,...
behind that stack of suitcases....
It's a ....what the hell is that thing...??"
The reigning champion of such hunts,
is my friend "the reet"
a California resident, from Queens,
via Alaska.
My ex wife dragged him along one day..
he hates garage sales..
and, on a block sale he wandered off alone
to the patio market at the very end of the row.
And there,
at the extremity of the far outer reaches..
under a worn tarp...
he found,
"The thing with eyes..."
It was as tall as a man,
with a strange platform upon which to stand.
There was a cave at the back of the platform,
and that's where you had to stick your feet,
if you were to prevent yourself from toppling backwards
off the platform.
.
It had a slender body,
a steel pole, gaudily wrapped in a crisscross maze of wires and connecters....
and at the height of the spine
was a small metal head shape,
with two huge glass eyes.
and it had a plug on a wire.
and it was one dollar...
"ONE DOLLAR"...
It was a boggling catch,
a stupendous find..
and, amateur though he may be in the gentle art of curio detection,
he spotted it's potential immediately...
and dragged it from beneath the tarp into the spring sunshine.
He half expected it to blink,
but it just stood,
staring balefully into the morning.
After the astonished owner actually found himself receiving money for this thing..
he quickly helped drag it's stiff torso to the car,
perhaps in fear that the reet would come to his senses and abandon the strange beast,
back to what had seemed for all the world
like a permanent home
beneath the tarp.
It was some years before we finally learned what the thing was.
And yet, despite our knowledge
it still remains the yardstick by which all cheap used treasures are measured.
But I digress from the true purpose of this typed drivel,
which is to address the two great problems which set to befall such
Saturday trash surfing.
The first of which is the omnipresence of those aforementioned neon signs,
splashing the landscape with unnatural color.
They are welcoming on Saturdays,
a beacon to adventure...
but by dusk on Sundays
they are left,
abandoned and forlorn..
huge scabrous blights on the suburban landscape,
they join the lazy litter of campaign placards
from elections long gone,
and the "work in progress" commercials
for roofers,
and siding installers,
and house painters and lawn fertilizing services.
As weeks go by,
eventually some enraged person,
who has spent his morning driving aimlessly through the house maze
looking for this long gone ghost of a garage sale,
tears the thing in wretched disgust
from it's staples,
and generally flings it to the ground.
Why don't people take these things down...
why don't we make them take them down..
after all, they served their purpose - did their jobs.
Why mess up the view?
Why irritate the sale aficionados
with false promises and dashed raised hopes.??
We must stop this slovenly slothfulness...
we must make sales disappear at their demise,
leaving, like the high ocean winds,
naught to signal their passing
save for a ruffle in the general invisible economy.
And here's the other problem...
boy scouts...
boy scouts with their incessant demands to wash my car,
or cut my lawn,
or sell me something intrinsically bad for me,
like popcorn or xmas paper in July.
They show up on weekends,
at my door,
small pleading eyes trying to shame and guilt me away
from my rightful place in
"the armchair which no work dare approach"...
and they force me to buy stuff,
massive quantities of stuff which I have to wait weeks to get.
What do they do with all this money..???
Is there someplace a wonderous boy scout theme park,
almost completed construction...
waiting only for the last of my meager savings
to finish the nirvana???
It's begging..
the worst possible kind of begging..
based on guilt and shame,
and a sense of youth abandonment pricking at what remains of our consciences.
And it's probably what drove me to begin garage sailing in the first place,
in a desperate attempt to not be home when they came calling.
I am truly sorry that some simple system of funding cannot be devised
for all such worthy organizations,
that they may dedicate themselves to their full time pursuits
so designated by years of tradition and proud history.
And so,
I humbly risk the onset of common sense overdose,
in suggesting that, as usual,
the solutions lie within the problems..
that difficulties combined can often serve to cancel each other out..
that, in fact, two wrongs can sometimes make a right...
(sorry grandma...)
Let's do this...
let's pass a city ordinance that all garage sale signs must be taken down, when defunct...
that all lawn advertising, political or otherwise be given a decent burial
after it's time has passed.
And let's make the punishment for laziness and tardiness,
in regard to this ordinance,
be a ten dollar ticket.
And let's use those marauding hordes of wide eyed well prepared beggars,
to police this ordinance,
tracking down the criminals and presenting them with their ticket.
Let's send them, the bicycle brigade,
whirling through the thoroughfares of the town...
stalking and tracking and serving the summons
to beautify the community,
and finance the knot ready youth
in it's healthful activities.
We get our yellophone poles back...
the city gets to keep five dollars to build better roads,
finer schools,
and expand its parks departments and libraries..
and the boy scout troups get the other five dollars...
to do with as they see fit,
but at least to help offset the considerable and growing costs of scouting
for those families less fortunate than some others.
hey folks,
whyever not???
and think about these two things...
why are girl scout cookies made in a far away factory,
by some faceless and doubtless humorless corporate Simon Legree,
then shipped to some hapless volunteer's overcrowded garage
and then distributed
in the weak arms of doe eyed children who disobey the cardinal rule
by knocking at the doors of strangers
and guilting them into buying sugar and preservatives,
at exorbitant prices...
every other month,
or so it seems..???
And why is there no longer a fruit tree in each back yard,
filling the air with the scent of its springtime blossoms,
and the skies with the colors of it's blooms,
and the laps of our children with its nourishment???
We can fix these things.
If you found any of these pieces educational or at least amusing, drop a note of encouragement to
and maybe more such pieces will appear....
and
Remember to hug your Kids
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