The Circle

 

New leaf-buds erupt on every tree in a riot of impossible green. Flowers spread their newborn blossoms to kiss the gentle rain. Pasty-white legs poke tentatively out of creased shorts that smell like mothballs.

 

It's Spring!

Here in the Midwest there is an even more reliable sign of spring, usually seen scrawled with a magic marker on flaps torn from brown corrugated cardboard boxes. And the sign says:

"Rummage Sale."

 

While I've never actually looked it up, I can say with some authority that I know what "Rummage" means. It means "Crap." And I'm willing to bet that the word was invented by someone who had the good marketing sense to understand the down-side of a sign that said, "Crap Sale."

 

Nevertheless, a Rummage Sale is a place where people go to get or get rid of Crap. In fact, it's not at all unusual to see a person bring some Crap in and take different Crap home. This is all part of the natural flow of life that I like to call the "Circle of Crap."

 

The first part of the Circle is mankind's never-ending Quest for Crap. This is the same primal urge that moves a teenager to get his first job, or Attila the Hun to pillage Europe - in both cases they are just trying to accumulate more Crap than they had before.

 

Once you get yourself some Crap, you need to take care of it. At its most basic level all you really need in the way of a "home" is some way to keep your body warm. Anything beyond that is about your Crap; a roof and walls to keep it dry, doors so you can get to it, and locks on the doors so other people can't.

As you gather more and more Crap, you need more and more space to keep it in, and this added space can become highly specialized. You might have a Garage for your Rolling Crap, a Kitchen for your Edible Crap, and a Family Room for your Family Crap.

Inevitably though, from almost the instant you get your Crap, and even though you continue to put a lot of effort into taking care of it, you begin to lose interest in it. Before you've paid the Visa bill you are often casting your covetous eyes on  newer, better, more up-to-date Crap.

As your desire for new Crap grows, so does your dissatisfaction with the Crap you already have, and you begin to think of it as "Old Crap." Before long you're finding excuses not to use your Old Crap, and you eventually demote it to storage in the Attic, the Basement or the Garage.

While moving Old Crap to storage theoretically opens you up to bringing in some New Crap, this is a temporary solution at best. In fact, if you were raised in a guilt-based environment (in other words, if you are me), you may find it hard to go out and buy New Crap when you have essentially the same Old Crap sitting in the pile of Crap that's responsible for keeping your Rolling Crap parked out in the driveway.

So you decide to get rid of the Old Crap. But since you can still remember when your Old Crap was New Crap you can't bring yourself to simply throw it away, to wind up in some landfill covered with dirt and other peoples' Crap.

Finally, driven by a blend of desperation and nostalgia, you look for something useful to do with your Old Crap. Life would be perfect if only you could find someone to whom it could become, even for a while, New Crap.

The solution, of course, is the Rummage Sale - and the Circle of Crap is complete.

God Bless America!