Sale Away

My parents spent everything they had and then some to live in our neighborhood, which is ironic because that neighborhood put on the greatest community-wide yard sale of down-market gems in the history of suburban hoarding. Money may have been the middleman, but the endgame was clear: This was inventorying a family’s mélange of spectacular garbage, distributing it to countless other homes across the neighborhood, and replacing it with entirely new wastes of space, each of which could be sold back twelve months later. The yard sale was a mere reshuffling, an exercise steeped in the hope that next year might be better, at least atop the mantle.

We moved to Denver on Father’s Day. My mother and father, in their evident wisdom, left my grandparents to fly two toddlers across the country while they went house hunting. Years later, I told my grandmother that I was sorry for the three-plus hours of uncontrollable wailing. Like a soldier forced to relive events too complicated and terrible to describe, she mustered: “You should be.”

It was a stressful time. Both of my parents had grown up in Boston, attended school in Boston, and started their careers in Boston. It was their only home. But Denver represented a real break for my father, so they left it all behind—including, as I mentioned, their children.

The neighborhood they selected was a mix of classic nuclear families and broken homes that seemed better off broken. The house I grew up in had an idyllic yard, enough space, and a laundry chute. I’ll always romanticize that neighborhood and that house—probably because we didn’t stay forever—but from the beginning my folks were broke. We didn’t do exotic family vacations; we went camping and cut out travel coupons.

That didn’t matter to the neighbors. The only sacred commitment a family had to make was participating in the yard sale, a sort of Halloween for peddlers. My family wasn’t among the original settlers, but some of those who were took this covenant quite seriously. Avoidance indicated a ritzy spirit not fit for the block. It was our duty to covet, if not our neighbor’s ox, at least our neighbor’s rust-orange slinky.

It could be quite bewildering to see a neighbor’s for-sale table displaying a set of fridge magnet-bottle openers depicting war heroes of the Pacific Theater—not for your discovery of the physical-world definition of a collector’s collectible, but for your neighbor’s gall in putting a price on this priceless piece that you sold to them last year. There are no guarantees when destinies change hands with the yearly calendar, including the prospect that the shitterati will not attempt to sell back what once had been your shittiest crown jewel.

For the sake of my younger, better self, I am glad beyond measure that I never again came across the black truck I sold. I can’t remember how old I was, but I was comfortably in the single digits; I’d guess five.

I was five years old and I had a black plastic truck, big enough for a five-year-old to sit in it or—if that five-year-old were a daredevil—on it, but small enough to drive around in circles on the cement patio of my backyard without throwing up from the centrifugal force.  The black truck was part of a series of non-automobiles I had amassed for my transportational delight. The yellow big wheel was for casual joyrides. The red tricycle—the pink Cadillac of my collection—fulfilled my need for speed. With one foot on the back bumper and the other foot repeatedly kicking the ground to maintain velocity, I would zoom around in circles shouting, “Arriba, Arriba!”—a proud demonstration of what I had learned from part-time Spanish teacher and full-time stereotype, Speedy Gonzales.

The black truck, however, was my family minivan. It was comfortable, safe, secure, and responsible. In plastic truck form, it was the closest thing to home. I knew the others were vehicles I would outgrow, indulgences evoking the different phases and psychological crises of aging. The truck was somehow different. I don’t remember when I got it, nor do I know how long I had it, but I vividly remember when I lost it forever.

It was not a day like any other. It was a very specific day, the day after the yard sale, and things in the yard were not for sale. Tables of knickknacks were not manned in the front lawn. Masses of people were not walking aimlessly up and down the street. In houses across the neighborhood, spouses were not panicking any longer at the prospect of their other halves successfully pawning off their youthful treasures—or they were not speaking to their other halves. I know my mother was home, a fact integral to the events of this story. I suspect it was a Sunday.

I didn’t hear the doorbell ring or the knocker knock. I was engrossed in the task at hand, a task I don’t specifically recall that had something to do with the backyard. The backyard easily and often consumed my focus because it retained certain surrealist properties. Three sides of the rectangular boundary were walls of thick vegetation and the fourth was our house. This layout established a clear line between events that took place in the yard and those that transpired in the rest of the world—which, I assume, is why my parents opted to go broke for it.

My love for the yard yielded an intimate knowledge of its secrets: where to hide, where not to sit, what could be eaten, when the giant bushes were frozen enough to climb. In summer, it was a valley on the outskirts of a forest teeming with life; in winter, it was the loneliest, emptiest, and quietest plateau on Earth (in a good way).

Such nuanced understanding was not required on this day. It would not take my fastidiously cultivated exploratory insight to recognize that something was awry. No, I knew something was amiss as a result of one of the more obvious signs of amissness: There was a stranger in my house.

And soon after there was a stranger in my backyard, an elderly lady who did not portend some imminent calamity. Her presence, though odd, seemed innocent. She managed to take me completely out of my element, as it is impossible to feel detached from the world when something from it enters yours. I felt self-conscious about whatever I was doing, so I made my way over to where my mother and the stranger were chatting.

The stranger, I inferred, had missed the yard sale. I certainly don’t speak for anyone but myself when I say that stinging regret would not have been my primary emotion had I been the one to miss it. Even at five years old, the strangeness of the stranger’s excuse for intrusion was not lost on me. She had come to my house like a deadbeat dad—unwanted, trying to make up for lost time, only instead of making the long and hard journey to pursue reparations for emotional failings, this was the extremely short and easy journey to pursue thrift. At least a deadbeat dad generally has a target child or group of children in mind; I don’t think he would attempt to build a relationship with the nearest residents who happened to be home at the exact time he felt so inspired.

Let’s pause the tale here to ponder on the stranger’s thought process.

May I enter your home and bid on what tickles me? I’m looking for abstract art made by children under four.

Is it unusual but still entirely reasonable to walk over to the house of an unfamiliar neighbor on a random day to ask if you can look around and make offers on their stuff? How many days after a yard sale does it remain acceptable to invoke any of its terms? I would think zero.

For all I know, the stranger might have resided in an entirely different neighborhood. Perhaps she heard about the yard sale from a friend and was simply too inept or indifferent to care about social norms, like knowing the days of the week. While her history was unknown to me, her intentions became clear in no time: She wanted my black plastic truck.

Is the customer always right if you’re not a business but, in fact, a place where people live?

Everything was fine. The stranger seemed to want the truck, and my mother seemed to say it was not for sale. I don’t recall a longwinded exchange, and all the momentum was on the side of the status quo. Had I not said anything, the stranger might have moved on to other parts of the house or other houses altogether. But we know how this story ends. The exact wording is, thankfully, lost to the wind, but for some inexplicable reason I interjected to offer the truck.

I gave the stranger the benefit of the doubt and assumed the white-haired lady did not want it for herself, but I can offer no explanation for my motivations in this moment. Perhaps it was altruism, but I think it far more germane that I was five years old, and five-year-olds haven’t internalized several relevant concepts: “consequences,” “buyer’s (and seller’s) remorse,” or “later.” Later, of course, I would be sad. Truly sad.

In the immediate aftermath of my stupidity, the tides turned. After coming this far (or not far, as the case may be), after making it to the backyard of a completely unknown family, the stranger’s quest was tantalizingly close to bearing fruit. I have no recollection of the ensuing dialogue—suppression of the traumatic, no doubt—but I had undermined my mother. On the one hand, now she had permission to be a good neighbor and sell something to this invader. Perhaps in doing so, she could rid herself of this odd creature and return to the simple pleasures of Sunday afternoon. Perhaps I did her a solid. Somehow, I doubt this.

My mother had made her position clear and unimpeachable: The truck was not for sale. That was going to be the end of it, right up until the moment I snatched heartache from the jaws of the way things were. Now I had boxed her in. Why would she not sell the truck when the trucker appeared to have no need for it? I can’t tell you how I know, but I know she didn’t want to sell it even after I spoke up. I think it pained her to lose it. I don’t know if I hurt her feelings with the suggestion that something she had gotten for me was no more than yard sale-worthy, but I know she hurt on my behalf. As a fully functioning non-idiot, she knew what was to come: a basket case in emotionally-unrefined-toddler-car-collector form, an idiot paying for the temporary gratification of feeling helpful. And she was going to have to deal with it.

My mother tried to stop it because she knew best. She didn’t ask me because she didn’t want to put me in the position of having to act selfishly—all kids are selfish, just like they’re supposed to be. She tried to fall on the sword. That’s love.

At least the stranger could take heart in the knowledge that she had saved a few bucks while procuring a gift for a small child, assuming this was a gift, by parting a perfect black truck from another small child. It would have been fascinating to discover later that she had invited herself into the home of a second unsuspecting family to deliver the truck to a child she did not know. This scenario seems farfetched.

I don’t know how much my mother got for it, and I don’t remember watching it get taken away. The stranger may have purchased other things, but I was not involved. This memory, every once in a while, surges to the front of my mind and hurts. Even now, what I feel for the stranger, I admit with some embarrassment, can only be described as loathing, though this is unnecessary given that she has probably moved on to bigger, better, and more permanent things, far beyond the reach of mortal anguish.

Yet this was a story of my own making, one I only remember as a consequence of my involvement. My five-year-old self feels like another human being, so different from who I am now that he must simply be somewhere nearby. All I have to do is find him, shake him a bit, and stop him from doing the unthinkable.

When my life is over, I hope it will have been a good one as judged by some meaningful set of measurements. But if for some reason it comes up short, if it fails entirely, or if it reaches great heights only to plummet dramatically back to Earth, will they of the future go back and discover that this was the source of my misfortune? The lost part of my soul? Was a black plastic truck my Rosebud?

Perhaps this scenario also seems farfetched, but I’m not prepared to rule it out.