Bobbin and Lace and Tatting

What’s More Fun, The Garage Sale Or The Hunt For The Sale?

Garage sales and the hunt for them present two adventures for the typical human being, who’s actually a cheapskate at heart. The first — and probably most intense adventure — is the hunt for the garage sale, which many people would actually say is more viscerally satisfying than the garage sale itself, if one were being honest. Once we’ve convinced ourselves that stuff in all its glory is what we need, the need to hunt for it becomes intense.

Nowadays, the garage sale industry — meaning websites and businesses that help people hold garage sales and also find them — has led to this sort of sale being almost like baseball in terms of a national pastime. Now, just why the hunt for something like a digital sport watch at some garage sale might be similar to finding the fabled Lost City of Gold is a question best left unanswered, but the fact is people lust after garage sale stuff.

So; how does one explain the obsession that leads to an endless Saturday morning drive around many local neighborhoods in search of any sign of garage sale? For those with garage sales on the brain, chances are that not much would be said, because it is such a completely natural activity. Just point that sort of person to the electric guitar for sale, even though that garage activity where the guitar was at has nothing more than lace doilies left.

The guitar advertised for sale probably went long ago and those doilies are the only things left, so a box of them probably will end up in the basement or the attic because everybody knows a garage sale in which nothing was bought is like an African safari in which not even a lonely and forlorn gazelle happened to be spotted. And, truly, hunting for a garage sale is kind of like going out on a safari in many respects.

Perhaps one is going on safari — we mean ‘hunting for a garage sale’ — to find some fitness equipment. Now, never mind that we once paid thousands of dollars for a gym membership that quickly fell into disuse when we found out that working out in a gym actually caused sweat. No, what we’ve convinced ourselves of is that the equipment for sale at some garage get-together will look perfect in the new fitness room were going to build. Maybe.

In reality, it hardly makes a bit of difference whether or not we really managed to locate anything of any worth at one of these sales. Instead, we’re just like those big game hunters of olden times; we’re out for the biggest game we can find, which in this case means maybe a box of old 1970s-era disco music cassettes that we once danced wildly to in our high school days. It kind of thrills us like getting on a roller coaster used to do.

In the end, adventures in garage sale hunting are in and of themselves a lot of fun. Who cares if we really find anything we like as long as we get out there and scour the neighborhoods like some modern day Treasure Hunt contestant or like a band of pirates desperately following the map to some fabled buried treasure? Usually, the treasure is never found or has already been looted before we get there but we’ll talk for years about the adventure.

Britney Spears – Lace and Leather (Live in Atlantic City)