I used to get the same kick going fish but this haul is so much more amazing. For twenty bucks I fill my station wagon with stuff to replace the stuff I filled it with before. Then I'm quite stuffed, thank you very much. I have my consumer fix so I can scoff at flyers and malls and red tag days for a while longer.
Eventually, I join my neighbours (who bought their stuff retail) and we have a sale together, a potlatch to dump the excess of our material success, everything we craved and saved and shopped for. We make a few hundred dollars and all go out to buy some more.
Winnipeg may be the motherlode of that great ritual purging we call garage sales. We are true shoppers - dedicated but canny - a test market for the continent. If it sells in Winnipeg, it will sell anywhere. And garage sales sell. Winnipeggers seem to excel in turning their private reality into public retail. Everything's for sale and everyone becomes Nick Hill for a day.
In high seasons (late spring and early fall) you don't need to check the classified at all -you hardly need to read the signs. Just drive down any lane, look for a jam of cars and parents hurrying their children or loaded down with old track lighting, engraved beer mugs and the past five years of People magazine, a buck a dozen. It's a sale. And if it isn't, make an offer anyway.
A friend of mine was cleaning his garage when his neighbour for a prank put up a sale sign with his address. By the third carload of garage salers, my friend gave in and made $200 in three hours.
If you really want to learn about Winnipeg, take the Garage Sale Tour down our back alleys and into our yards, porches and basements. You'll see more than on any red double-decker tour bus.
I remember what I call the Angst Sale with most everything spray-painted black. It required major burrowing through boxes strewn about the gravelled yard. The sellers were too deeply in despair to do more than raise a palm for payment. "You want change, mister? Ha, don't we all!"
There was the Party Hearty Sale where good old boys were playing all the records before they could be sold. "I don't know the prices. Hey, Frank, do know the prices? Say, how about a beer?"
The Fisher Price Sale had twin sisters pumping me with Koolaid and their little brother howling when they tried to sell his teddy bear. There were Girl Sales of stemware, Avon cosmetics and macrame planters. There were Guy Sales with oily tools, old cameras, a couple rotweiler puppies in a cage. There were Righteous Sales in a church basement with the same battered pots and pans from year to year unto eternity, hovered over by a sweet teetering old woman blessing every purchase.
There was the Family in a Very Tense Estate Sale with kin conspiring in various rooms, teeth clenched in strange smiles. The uncle's death was not the shock, it was seeing how little he was really worth. They'd been eyeing his possessions for so many years and were horrified to see them fetching such small change.
I'll never forget the Grudge Sale. There weren't many items but one was a new exercise bike, without a klik on its odometer. The owner, quite a substantial woman, was working through a box of doughnuts on her front stairs. The price tag read, $10. I said, "seven". She said, "sold". As I paid, I asked why she took so little. She Iscowled at the bike and muttered, "It was a gift!".
It was the Student Sale where I learned my lesson. I had donated odds and ends to a young woman trying to raise tuition. When I stopped at her sale I bought a set of glasses. It was only afterwards that I realized they were the ones I'd given her. And I didn't even get that good a deal.
Every sale is a stage set for confessions, accusations, crises and resolutions. Every object has its story. Maybe some stories are better forgotten and that's one good secret reason for a sale. But, surely, not all. Being a writer, that's what draws me most, the stories, real or imagined that possess the things that we come to possess. I've picked up some terrific bargains and treasures, too, but my favourite is a battered model car, 1930's style, made of scrap wood and Meccano pieces with windows drawn in pencil. I imagine it was put together by some unemployed father during the Depression. To me it's the best toy that any kid could get.