Atomictumor

Several weekends ago the family and I went out yardsale shopping. Spotz, the middle child, was so excited he even carried his tin bank with him. He knows yardsales are the place to find the glittery junk he loves. In fact he wanted to buy just about every homemade Christmas ornament he ran across. Homemade Christmas ornaments seem to rival coffee mugs in their ubiquity. Spotz doesn’t appreciate coffee mugs, yet.

We went to only two yardsales that morning. I think it was the poorly advertised official First Saturday for yardsales. There weren’t that many people with junk set up, but amazingly enough we met with success.

I was talking with some folks at work, sometime after all this, telling them all about our yardsale adventure. One of the ladies I was talking to made the comment that when she and her husband were starting out, people didn’t have yardsales. That’s amazing to me. I remember seeing enough of them when I was growing up, so they’ve always been pretty common to me. If she’s right, then yardsales started catching on about thirty years ago.

I asked her what people did with all their junk, if they didn’t have yardsales. She told me that people wore things out. The other things they gave them away to family and friends. If it was something valuable, like furniture, they’d put an add in the paper.

So, what’s interesting to me is this. You could totally write a history of Yardsales with this idea. (Yes, this sort of thing is interesting to me.) It would be a great master’s thesis project for an American History degree. I don’t know how you would do the research for it, but that would be part of the challenge.

It would seem that people started thinking about their junk differently a few decades ago. They started seeing some sort of monetary value in it. People also started relating to their neighbors differently at that time too. Instead of just giving it away, they’d sale it. People also started using their possessions differently, too. Instead of wearing it out, just buy a new model and sale the old, but still useable one.

A disposable economy, apparently.

Anyway…

We found an old crib at one of these two yardsales. The price was right,so we bought it. The plan was for me to strip the crib. What a great project for a dad, right? I was going to paint it different colors. I got started.
Then something happened that stopped the whole project.

Spotz realized that the old crib had seen three Cemestos babies, himself included. It was suddenly and very apparently, a part of the family. We coudn’t just throw that crib out into the street.

So, that’s how my career as a stripper was abruptly ended by my eldest son. I think I can make a fortune on that yardsale thesis, though.

Read more about the next nine months over at my new blog. It’s called, Two Pink Lines.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 29th, 2006 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Consumerism, Newbaby, Kids, Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.