First Saturday in May, every year, the town I live in turns into a flea market. They call it the City-Wide Garage Sale, and in some neighborhoods (mine, for instance), every fourth house or so has a sale.
Which draws the bargain hunters like product liability draws attorneys.
They crawl over the town, some of them in pickups piled up like a modern imitation of the Sanford & Son truck.
We didn't get out early, and it was probably a good thing. I didn't have much to spend and neither did the girls. By the time we were out, most garage sales had a quarter bin and when Mo would zoom in on it, more than one seller said, 'Hell, she can have that stuff.'
Some of them knew Mo, some were just too tired to take a dollar for four toys. By the time we were done, the girls could hardly sit in the back seat for all the loot they got before their collective $3 ran out.
Em found a typewriter for a buck. A Tower President XII, a model I've never heard of, so I'm pretty sure no ribbons will be available at any price. It's hard enough for the few freaks holding onto IBM Selectrics to get supplies, never mind some cheapo manual portable job.
I bought Em some rollerblades for $8, painfully passed up a pretty nice electric guitar that was mint-condition in its shipping container for $130 because I just can't spend that on a toy right now even if it would be literally stealing it.
And all along I hoped to find a KitchenAid. I've wanted one for a long time, even come close to putting the model Wal-Mart sells in the cart, a $200 item. Expensive but you'd never have to replace it and I'd use the shit out of it.
So imagine my delight when I spot a KitchenAid stand mixer marked for $25. An older one, to be sure. Would you take $20? I asked. The seller looked at his watch and nodded.
No dough hook, but the paddle is what I see Jill Santopietro do in the video embedded in this NYT Magazine piece.
And Em pointed me to some lobster-shaped soap.
Anyway, a good time was had by all on something like thirty bucks all in.
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