I'm in rapture. There's just nothing like this time of year. It's my favorite season: yard sale season.

I love yard sales because they allow people to openly confess their cultural sins: Forgive me, Father, for I have owned a Shaun Cassidy album. Host a yard sale and you've given up all rights to privacy. All the buying errors you've ever made, the kitchen gear you've bought while watching late-night TV, the clown paintings you got for $15 from some guy in a van in the K-Mart parking lot, the dust-caked Thighmaster—there it all is, spread out on the lawn for all to see.

The good thing is that it works both ways. I mean, who looks sillier at a yard sale: the guy selling the football-shaped beer-logo lamp or the guy buying it? See, that's another wild thing about yard sales. Unless the people who are scooping up all the freakier offerings are out gathering all things tacky in a bid to rid the world of kitsch like some kind of Aesthetic Avenger, what yard sales perpetuate is a closed-system economy of crap. Chance are, that football lamp will reappear at another yard sale within five years. I've always wanted to plant a little transmitter in a duck-shaped toilet paper holder and track its migration from sale to home to sale.

But where does all this stuff initially come from? Yes, we buy much of it for ourselves. No one ever went broke underestimating the good taste of the American public. Ask the guy who created the Singin' Bass. I have the phone number to his fourth home, the one in Aruba. But I think that if you did a study, the results would show that the majority of stuff sold at a yard sale was given as a gift.

It's horrifying to realize how others see us, what they believe we like or would adorn our homes with. But in the heat of the gift-giving moment, you just can't decline when Aunt Betty says, "See? They're salt and pepper shakers! You just twist their little Amish heads off…"

I have a friend who was given a wooden nutcracker carved in the shape of a woman. One simply places the nut between her thighs and squeezes. I swear this is true. While it's admittedly intriguing from a metaphorical standpoint, on all other levels, it's just in bad taste. But it was a gift, and he held onto it, well-hidden, until he was able to ditch it via the perfect foisting arena: the yard sale. I understand it was bought by the curator of the Museum of Modern Misogyny.

While the gifts we're shoveling off for a dollar tell us what others think of us, it's by our music that we spill the goods on ourselves. Nothing delineates the course our lives have taken quite like the albums we owned. Go into that $1 record box at a yard sale and try to figure out who was grooving to the Tijuana Brass and Andy Williams or bopping to Debbie Gibson and Tiffany. And try to be sympathetic to what the albums you're scoring for short money mean to the seller: If you find Meatloaf's "Bat Out of Hell," you can be 90 percent sure a certain landmark event took place while it was playing. (And if it turns out that they've replaced the album with the CD, bump that figure up to 100 percent.)

Yes, this weekend you can find me wandering through the detritus of other people's lives. And for a dollar or two, I get to take some of it with me.

About the author, John Shanahan: John Shanahan is a freelance writer living in Norton, MA. His column, The View From Here, appears regularly in the Norton Mirror, Mansfield News, and Easton Journal. Comments are welcome at jcshanahan@hotmail.com

Readers Comments About This Page:

Be the first! Add Your Comment!