What a garage sale says about seller and buyer alike

Whether strolling through the streets of Pittsburgh or taking a ride through the suburbs, I often notice official-looking signs on lawns or wrapped around posts: Garage Sale. Summer is the season of garage sales — that annual tradition when people make room in their attics, basements and lockers for new stuff by unloading old stuff onto willing strangers.

While I am not a huge fan of garage sales, I did end my 35-year absence from Pittsburgh with a sale. In June 2003, I gathered decades of things I had kept for no discernible reason, displayed them on tattered quilts covering the cracked sidewalk outside my apartment building, created signs out of cardboard and markers, and tried to ignore the hot Detroit sun so I could earn a few dollars on … stuff.

Garage sales, I learned, reveal a lot about the people who go to them. Older couples lit up upon discovering a box of “lovingly used” light bulbs; single buyers gravitated toward bags containing “slightly used” bars of soap and half-filled bottles of shampoo and conditioner; mothers fought over Cabbage Patch babies that had not aged well; dads competed for pocket-sized video games that not even an engineer could get to work again; and kids kept whining that there was no lemonade stand. Everyone haggled over price as if in some kind of war and needing to prove something by getting me to lower the cost of an item. I usually gave in because I knew an extra dime or quarter would not affect the quality of my retirement years.

I also learned that garage sales reveal a lot about the seller.

Several sets of china dishes represented the days of my marriage when I kept separate dishes for meat and dairy foods. The dishes, like the defunct marriage, were chipped and scratched; the gold trim on the “good” dishes had worn off.

A blue plaid suitcase, too large for today’s planes and regulations, had sticky spots where labels had once been attached. I thought about all the countries that suitcase and I had visited — Greece, Italy, France, Israel and England. Now, it would either travel with someone else or end up at Goodwill. Maybe someone would fix its wobbly wheels and uncooperative handle.

So many toys lay scattered on the quilts: an eyeless teddy bear, a doll sporting a bad haircut, a tricycle whose horn lay silently in the bike’s stained basket, boxes of board games with important pieces missing. The toys and games contained echoes of my son’s and daughter’s laughter and hints of their innocent childhood smiles. By the time my kids had become teenagers and outgrown the toys, they understood that a stuffed animal or game did not guarantee happiness.

When I emptied my storage locker to prepare for my garage sale, I discovered a half-dozen boxes the color of sand, each held in place by a darker brown piece of tape. I could not remember what I had so carefully packed, and I wondered what could be so important to keep yet not important enough to use and enjoy. Opening the boxes and removing wads of tissue paper, I found pictures and papers from my children’s elementary school years, photos that had never made their way to albums and other mementos of the past. The content of these boxes made me ache for what had been and no longer was, for the passage of time and the passing of dreams. Knowing that no garage sale shoppers would be interested in such personal items, I retaped the boxes and had the movers transport them to Pittsburgh.

A fan stood in the middle of the stuff. It resembled a bald man with one leg and no arms. Rust, not wrinkles, revealed its age. Without a cord, the fan seemed to lack purpose. Because I had just retired and was returning to Pittsburgh with no concrete plans for the next act in the drama of my life, I feared that this fan was an omen of the days, weeks, months and years that awaited me — a time that would render me as useless as the fan. I gave the fan to an elderly man without charging.

By the end of the day, I had managed to sell about 50 percent of my stuff. Except for the boxes from the past, I gave everything else to secondhand stores.

For the past 14 years, I have focused on building a life in Pittsburgh — one that includes teaching, taking classes and ushering at local theaters. I have neither the time nor energy to go to garage sales, and I do not have the space for someone else’s stuff. I still carry enough baggage of my own.