A Corollary of This Golden Age...

Come to think of it, garage sales are such a such a prominent feature of North American life there must be a garage sale literature.... What a fertile subject! What a way to meditate on use, misuse, superfluity, the passage of time … it has all the elements of still life, Van Gogh's shoes… here you're free to include any of what Bly refers to as "the hundred thousand objects of modern life" (which his poems carefully exclude…to his credit at least as much as discredit…)

To me the most memorable piece on garage sales has to be not a poem or short story of novel, but a song. But so close to a poem it is… Tom Waits' Soldier's Things on the Swordfishtrombones album. (That has to be one of my favourite albums, ever, not to mention one of my favourite bits of songwriting...) Here are the lyrics, devoid of course of the expressiveness of Waits' rust-bucket voice:

Davenports and kettledrums
and swallow tail coats
table cloths and patent leather shoes
bathing suits and bowling balls
and clarinets and rings…
and all this radio really needs
is a fuse

a tinker, a tailor
a soldier's things
his rifle, his books full of rocks
and this one is for bravery
and this one is for me
and everything's a dollar
in this box…

Cuff links and hub caps
trophies and paperbacks
it's good transportation
but the brakes aren't so hot
necktie and boxing gloves
this jackknife is rusted
you can pound that dent out
on the hood

a tinker, a tailor etc.

If any of you readers out there can think of a great piece of garage sale literature, tell me what it is, send it (especially if it's a poem) along… if not, maybe you can write one yourself!

THE GOLDEN AGE OF GARAGE SALES

Haven't been inclined to post… many "deep & profound & penetrating issues" I could write about, but been cleaning my desk, the whole house actually, + getting ready to make a new round of submissions. (Deep & profound enough in its own way.) For the last two weekends, we've (my partner Jocelyne & I) have been taking advantage of garage sale bonanzas. We haven't even been looking for them. We just came across them walking down the street. Jocelyne bought two leather coats, one from England, one from Italy, both very stylish and in pristine condition, for all of $40 for the first and $15 for the other. Even I lucked out on a fabulous leather jacket, which was for sale for $30 at the local cleaners… apparently whoever who was left it, didn't pick it up. This weekend, we bought a gorgeous clay pot for $15, a clay smiling sun (such as we see on astrology charts, but not at all tacky) which we have in the corner of the kitchen, for $15, an extraordinary terra cotta coffee mug for $3, a beautiful wicker/forged iron in/out tray sort of thing for $40 (a bit pricey, but it occasioned my cleanup), & a Faber & Faber collection of poetry called By Heart - 101 Poems to Remember, edited by Ted Hughes, in his final poet laureate years, for $1. (Actually a damned interesting little collection, with a good introductory essay on mnemonic devises.) This from a very interesting young woman with plenty of culture & good taste who was selling off all her things "for higher than average garage sale prices" to go off and volunteer teach in a cooperative school in India. With this higher cause - and pictures up of her cooperative, of the classroom she was going to teach in, & explanations of how she was going to help underprivileged children of India, she was a very persuasive salesperson. Nobody bargained her down.
In North America at least, this has to be the golden age of garage sales. Everybody with so much junk to sell. Even good stuff. As far as clothes are concerned, here in Montreal with outlets like Rennaissance & La Free-prix on Ontario St., if you've got a sharp eye (Jocelyne has that, fortunate for me) and a minimal degree of patience, there's need these days to go to retailers except for socks, shoes and underwear. (A secret perhaps we should keep to ourselves - but then many shy from the possibility of wearing dead people's clothing… and so prefer to shell out to the living dead, at retail prices.)