Warm Shirts

Janie and I go to a lot of yard sales. I've always wanted to make a living going to yard sales, and I've come close, but never quite close enough. 

Oh yeah, there was that time when I had a gas station with a big storage room in back.  I turned it into a second-hand store geared towards the tourists.  I went to yard sales and bought pots and pans for them to burn up on the campfire.  I had lots of old fishing poles.  Frisbees.  It was a good second hand store.

Then winter came and there were no tourists, but being on the most direct route from Salt Lake to Albuquerque, there were still travelers.  And it snowed like hell.  And the chain law would go into effect.  Most people don't have chains.  Even more people can't put chains on correctly (or don't want to put chains on because it means laying in the snow).

I had chains.  Lots of chains.  I made runs to Phoenix and - you guessed it - went to every carport sale (they don't have yards - it's too hot).  I'd ask, "Got any tire chains?"  They'd walk over to a car with Michigan, South Dakota, Ontario plates and open the trunk.

"What do you pay?"

"What are they worth to you?"

"I moved to Arizona.  How much do you think I value tire chains?"

Anywhere from free to five bucks later, I'd be off to the next sale.  In no time I'd have fifty, sixty sets of chains in my Mazda station wagon.  There are half-ton trucks.  There are three-quarter-ton trucks.  Mazda station wagons don't have a rating.  At fifteen hundred pounds of chains, I was overloaded.

Back up at my gas station in Colorado these chains would go, and wait for the chain law on Red Mountain Pass to go into effect.  They sold for twenty to thirty bucks a pair, installed. 

I'd put them on the right way:

- drape the chain over the tire,

-tuck the front end under,

-have the customer help me push - not drive - the car forward twenty-four inches,

-link the inside link,

-link the outside link,

-put on two sets of tighteners. 

Easy. I'd done it hundreds of times on my wood hauler.

But that's not the real story.

I moved to Minnesota, and I still had the yardsaling bug.  Separated from the person I moved there with, I relocated to Loring Park, on the edge of downtown. Lacking the extra money to rent a parking space, I parked my truck on the street.  After having it towed a couple times, I sold it to some scary guy from one of those "We Buy Cars" ads in the paper.  The real scary thing about him is he wasn't scared of me.  There in the dark city impound lot he handed a stranger a few hundred bucks for a truck.

So I bought a good bicycle I could take yardsaling around the urban lakeshore neighborhoods.  I had a big backpack and I bought books and sold them to the book store.  I bought vinyl and sold it to Cheapo.  I bought the things I needed to live for pennies on the dollar.

One day I saw one of those bike trailers they haul kids around in.  They told me one tire had a slow leak.   Five bucks.   I bought it and aired it up every Saturday morning.  I started hauling furniture and plants back to my brownstone apartment.  I was doing okay.

But that's not the real story.

One day in August I was back in Colorado, running my mom's gift shop while she took a nap, and a scruffy guy came in and headed straight for the warm shirts.  He was a big guy.  Probably worked construction and it didn't look like it paid any more now than it did back when I worked construction.  He grabbed a Woolrich, a couple Pendletons, a Ralph Lauren.  He put a wadded up twenty on the counter and reached back into his pocket.

"No tax, man.  Enjoy.  Stay warm."

He walked out with something approximating a smile.

Janie and I go to a lot of yard sales.  We buy warm shirts.  You know the ones.  When people get a job in Minnesota, their families think they're gonna freeze to death.  They send them warm shirts for Christmas - the kind of shirt that would keep you warm if you went out at 5 AM to milk the cows. 

These people work at Piper Jaffray, General Mills, Medtronic.  They have heated garages. The next spring those warm shirts are out on the yard sale rack, priced at a buck apiece.  We buy them and take them back to Colorado, where my mom sells them for five.

Some guy is helping smooth concrete on a December afternoon. It's three o'clock, and the sun has already gone behind the mountain.  He's doing okay.

Janie and I go to a lot of yard sales.  We buy warm shirts.