Rubber chicken plucked from discard pile
Garage sale treasures prove you can’t put a price on sentiment
The chicken that has followed me around town for many years finally went to a new, good home last week.
Casserole, as I called him, was given to me as a prize years ago. He was the perfect (rubber) pet and I grew quite fond of him. I didn’t have to walk Casserole or feed him. He just lay on a shelf with a stupid grin. But the smug grin eventually came to annoy me and I donated him to a charity’s silent auction.
Several years later, a Journal reader found Casserole in a pawnshop and returned him. “You’d autographed him,” she said. “I thought he might have a special place in your life.”
Casserole got his favourite shelf spot back. That’s until my good friend Bobbie Patrick told me last week she had organized a garage sale.
Bobbie had invited all her neighbours on Quensell Crescent to join her and throw open their garage doors.
I told her I would bring Casserole and other sentimental items we men of a certain age have difficulty parting with.
There was my grandmother’s flat iron (a forerunner of the electric iron); a black-andwhite Klondike jacket left by a late father-in-law, and the orange wig I had worn in the Bordeaux Marathon.
Antique dealers swept by early on the day of the sale, their GPS programmed with the garages they planned to hit. They totally ignored my lifetime’s treasures. That’s until Mary Benders came by and spotted Casserole. She didn’t haggle over my price of a toonie. “He’ll forever have a special spot by the pond in my backyard,” she said.
Casserole continued to grin. My next client did want to haggle over a toonie. He offered $8 for my grandmother’s iron. “It’s been through two World Wars,” I said. “I brought it to Canada as a young lad. It’s been a marvellous doorstop.”
The punter saw a piece of Scottish history slipping between his fingers and handed me two crisp $5 notes.
The only other sale I made was a print of lascivious dogs playing pool. A well-dressed woman kept returning to the print my Denver buddy Gerry Turner, who grew up in Manning, had sent me. I had no place to hang it and was delighted when the woman handed me a loonie.
“It captures my husband and his friends,” she told me. “He’ll eventually spot it on the basement wall and know it’s a subtle message.”
I nearly sold my orange wig to a girl in her teens, who had inquired my price. But her father physically took her arm and guided her away, saying gruffly: “We have one at home.”
If only he’d given me the time to tell him I had once dined in Bordeaux with the owners of Château Beychevelle and had been asked my “costume” for the marathon next day. I said vest and shorts. “Non, non,” they said. “Your ‘costume’?” They quickly acquired a pink tutu for me— and my orange wig. (I later often wore both.)
Unable to move laterally now with cartilage missing in my right knee, I was disappointed my old squash goggles failed to find a buyer at 10 cents.
Another disappointment was when the Viking helmet I once wore to ski the Birkebeiner failed to raise 50 cents. I should have put a note below it saying: “As seen on TV.” Television cameras caught the 20 friends I had talked into wearing Viking helmets and pinks tutus for the race.
After wrestling with my soul over my swim fins and weight belt, I asked a whopping $5 for them. But I am extravagantly emotional toward them, having last worn them scuba diving near Phuket in Thailand.
My profit for a 7.5-hour day at the garage sale was $1.20. I’d given Bobbie $1.20 for a dozen shot glasses; $5 for a backpack; $1 for a Chinese cup and $4 for four martini glasses.
I have no business sense. In five minutes, I could have made 50 times more by taking back my empties.