A rchive Date
[ 05-06-2000 ]
Category
[ Psychology ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[Garage and yard sales: It's a guy thing
By JOHN OAKLEY
Toronto Sun
April 15, 2000Every day modern science continues to make startling advances in mapping the human genome, unraveling the mysteries of DNA, finding the genetic roots of certain human characteristics and disease.
It's only a matter of time, then, before the white lab coat crowd stumbles upon the particular gene that's responsible for some men's inability to resist a yard sale. It must be a genetic thing. Or at the least a disease.
How else to explain grown men (and it is mostly men) who would otherwise bleat and moan about giving up part of their precious weekend to wifely pursuits, rising bright and early on a springtime Saturday morn, lured by the siren song of the neighbourhood garage sale.
It's something right out of Homer. Homer Simpson.
What is this unique affliction that causes otherwise rational human beings (read: guys), to suddenly fancy themselves collectors of chipped porcelain figurines of old sea captains? What inner tumult or turmoil drives a person halfway across town on the off-chance he might pick up some spare parts for that vacuum cleaner his better half took to the curb nine years ago? Like I say, it's gotta be genetic, or an illness, at least.
I mean, who really needs this junk? Why do you suppose your neighbour's unloading this stuff in the first place?
"Let's see, garbage pickup is Tuesday, this is Saturday, what the hey, I'll set it out on a couple of card tables in the yard and see what happens."
If it can't be scientifically determined that the compulsion toward garage sales, flea markets, etc., is genetically rooted, it would nonetheless make for a fascinating anthropological or sociological study.
In which case, the cul-de-sacs of suburbia on a springtime Saturday morning would be to any such study what Pelee Island is to bird watchers from the Audubon Society.
Nothing quite livens up a suburban neighbourhood like a driveway boasting plastic milk crates loaded with crap.
Some social scientists blame this urge to forage through other people's cast-offs on The Antiques Road Show, the television ratings colossus that takes its act from town to town, invariably greeted by anxious hordes, booty in hand, eagerly awaiting the appraisal of the experts.
It didn't exactly help that last year when the Road Show came to Toronto a local woman parlayed a $25 chochke into a (US)$115,000 treasure.
Suddenly every schlepper within a 60-mile radius of a garage sale was drawn in by the fantasy of finding a rare Dutch Master's etching in the mouldy cardboard boxes of some octogenarian's jetsam. The reality is they fritter away an entire afternoon foraging through thousands of "pretty" buttons in an old Dutch Masters cigar box. Enjoy, fellas - there's another five hours of your life you'll never get back.
Doubtless the bird-dogging at garage sales is an exercise that harkens back to the hunt.
In other words the garage sale satisfies in contemporary man a deep-rooted psychological need to stalk and kill his prey, only in this case, to find and purchase recycled junk.
The so-called killing is made all that much sweeter when buddy beats the estate owner's great grandchild down two bits on a collection of rusty coffee tins. Suddenly he's Pelle the Conqueror or some triumphant Peloponnesian warrior returning home after the sack of Athens.
There's another school of thought that traces our need to hoard and collect back to the Depression-era ethos of "waste not, want not."
It's a theory predicated on material insecurity which might explain the pack-rat-ism of our parents but doesn't exactly account for the voracious acquisitiveness of yuppies in designer clothes driving BMWs and Boxsters hither and yon when at the end of the day all they'll have to show for it is a macrame owl, or, if they're really lucky, a Dino, Desi and Billy lunchbox.
Yes, it's about the hunt, it's about the haggling, it's about paying cash on a $4 item and beating the revenuers out of 28c GST. But the mystique and allure of the yard sale is about more.
It's about hedging, listening to that inner voice telling you that one day the world will return to its senses, once again adopt the 8-track as the standard for audio fidelity, and while you can still pick 'em up at a paltry two bucks a gross, you're gonna do like Bunker Hunt did with silver back in the '70s and hoard baby, hoard.
It's about imagination and entrepreneurship, knowing if you did find musty old copies of the Scrubs on Skates trilogy by Scott Young, you can maybe start a library and maybe even charge people. One man's junk is another man's treasure.
But women don't get it. They only know that if their guy is out on a Saturday or Sunday for five or six hours at a stretch and he keeps coming back filling the garage or basement with all the "neat stuff" he's picked up they'd rather he be having an affair.
Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com ]
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