yard_sales raze they're full of surprises. a woman who likes a vase won't spend two bucks on it, but an old man with a magnificent beard will spend fifty dollars on a vase and a carpet runner for his disabled wife, in spite of another woman deciding she wants the runner after it's already been sold, refusing to let go until she finally slams it down on the ground with disgust when it becomes clear she isn't going to get her way. i think if the old man's wife hadn't been paraplegic, she would have climbed out of the van and physically fought the woman who tried to sneak the runner for herself. it got pretty heated there for a hot minute. yard sale drama. i think i've seen almost everything now. 130817 ... raze a well-preserved man in his mid-sixties showed up for the yard sale. he was looking for sports cards. he said he was only in town for a day or two, and his grandson was a collector. he bought some o-pee-chee hockey cards from the early 1990s that weren't worth much. he didn't pay much. he had an arrogant attitude and an accent i couldn't place. hungarian, maybe. two weeks later, he showed up at the door. the arrogance was gone. he looked like a hopeful child. "i was at your yard sale," he said. "do you have any more sports cards?" funny how he happened to be back in town. funny how his grandson wasn't mentioned again. there are some baseball cards, worth considerably more than the hockey cards he bought. they're not for sale. not yet, anyway. "do you have any old ones?" he asked after being told twice that there was nothing to buy. he didn't want to leave empty_handed. he left empty_handed. 130830 ... raze (didn't realize empty_handed wasn't a red blathe yet. it is now.) 130830 ... tender_square a man with a white beard who wears suspenders and an elf hat pulls out a doll’s pair of gryffindor pants and hands them to megan, acting like she dropped them. she laughs and uses them to keep her mike’s hard lemonade from sweating, says “how did he know that’s my house?” not long after, the same man pulls a plastic tiger from another pocket and hands it to jackie. she smiles like a child who just got the toy she wanted from one of those vending machines outside the grocery store. a little boy goes through a box of cat toys, selects a tinsel ball that chimes and asks us how much it is. jackie tells him it’s free. his mother looks through the clothing rack and remarks, “everyone has been giving him things today,” holding up a bag of odds and end. the boy returns to the box and walks up with a soft candy cane toy that crinkles when pinched. “how much for this?” he inquires. again, he’s so adorable, jackie tells him it’s his. “you can charge him, you know,” the mother says. she waves a plastic change purse in the shape of a spacecraft. “he’s got all this change he brought.” when he does get charged for his third cat toy, he picks a wedgie from his bum before handing jackie the dollar to break. a woman with short, pink curly hair that’s shaved on the sides considers buying a singing justin bieber toothbrush for her daughter. “she asked me for an electric toothbrush the other day, and i kinda want to gaslight her and say ‘isn’t this one’?” travis buys a box of donuts from dom’s around the corner and i eat a cinnamon roll that’s bigger than my face. we listen to a pandora station that’s a mix of norah jones and amy winehouse, or “classy and sassy” as katy dubs it. ambrosia the cat gets stuck between the open screen and the window meowing at us and we laugh at how her face scrunches against the prison of her own making. megan puts out an array of colourful, lacy, vs bralettes on a blanket that i consider buying from her. “these are really pretty,” i tell her. “they were the only things i could wear when i had cancer,” she said. “other bras bothered me.” i had forgotten megan’s been in remission for a few years but i like that she can talk to me about this, that we can get into the heavy things, even though we haven’t been friends for very long. i price a stand fan at $10 and a middle-eastern woman who doesn’t speak english has her son haggle it down to half. “but it has a remote,” i counter. “it oscillates.” she asks to test it out first, but when i plug the fan into a porch outlet it seems weak on the highest setting. the woman holds her hand in front of the airflow and shakes her head. “it’s not very strong,” her son says. “can you try another outlet?” travis is kind enough to run an extension cord from the house and the fan runs at its proper power, and i earn five bucks. john prices a vintage chest that was once his ex-wife’s at $60. now that he’s asked megan to move in with him, he wants to start fresh. near the end of the day, he offers it to me for twenty bucks and i jump at the chance to take it home, spending all i earned that day. a well-dressed woman with way too much plastic surgery indiscriminately shoves items from the free box into her handbag as megan and i move items around so we fold up empty tables. the woman says she needs a deal because she doesn’t have much money, says that she got stuff she didn’t need at other places. when she drives off, her car is rusted, the gas door gone, her vehicle and open trunk overflowing with cast-offs from other homes. 220613 what's it to you? who go blather from