If you ever want to meet interesting people from all walks of life, just have a garage sale.
Last week, I wrote my column prior to having a big sale and predicted it would be successful. It was. Not enough that I’m moving to Hawaii anytime soon, but I bought new tires for my vehicle and have some money left over.
As I also predicted, I saw people I’ve known for years, especially from back when I was addicted to going to garage sales — and I watched as old friends ran into each other and reminisced in my driveway.
This time, though, I think we set a record for meeting people with unusual stories.
Not long after we raised our garage door to the masses, a man stopped to talk to me. He asked if I knew his wife had died, which I didn’t, and I struggled to remember if he and I had met before. He told me how he used to be a professional singer — in the ’70s — and he played a song on his phone from his band. It was good. Really good. He told me that when he was in his 30s, he woke up one day and had a problem with his voice and never sang again. Bless his heart.
Amid the chaos of haggling with shoppers over prices and picking up a clothing rack that fell — twice — I heard more stories.
One woman was from Paragould — near my family’s home in Jonesboro — and she was lost. She’d taken her daughter to band camp at the University of Central Arkansas and was trying to get to the county library. She drove through those “turn-around thingies,” i.e., roundabouts, and got lost. She ended up at one garage sale, and then ours.
She told us how she used to live in California, and somebody came in their yard and tried to steal a car while they were standing there. She talked about how dangerous it was. Now, she said, stray dogs are her worse problem.
She was buying my mom’s chicken mugs for a friend who had chickens, despite the fact that, this shopper said, the woman had just undergone shoulder surgery and didn’t need a bunch of chickens.
“Silkies are the best chickens; they don’t fly over the fence or nothing,” she said.
Good to know.
She was happy to hear us say that we thought Conway was a safe place for her daughter to live the next four years while going to college.
My husband gave her directions to the library, and we hope she made it.
A couple I’ve known and seen at garage sales for 20 years came up, and I got caught up on his cancer treatments. They bought a lot and left, but the woman came back later. She told funny anecdotes about her granddaughter; then the woman complained about her “cheapie” cellphone, which had started talking to her every time she pushed a button.
My husband took it from her and spent about 10 minutes figuring out how to fix it while she shopped and talked.
As we were packing up, a woman came up with her arm in a brace, and she said she had “just come from the doctor” and also had broken ribs. I asked what happened. “The ladder moved,” she said.
“Were you on the ladder?” my husband asked.
Yes, she was.
Shopping with broken ribs and a banged-up arm, that’s a hard-core garage-saler.
She was our last customer, and we packed up, swept the garage and treated ourselves to dinner out.
We relived some of the best stories of the day, which I think will do me for a long time.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.