The Wounded And The Whole

It's been a busy sort of month, in case you hadn't noticed by my lack of posts. Not a constantly working sort of thing, but more of a can't seem to catch up sort of thing, which is good in a way. This past weekend though, we just sort of putzed around...

First of all, we had a long overdue garage sale, which are always fun. In case you haven't seen our attic, we have an impressive amount of crap... and I don't mean "wow, you have a lot of stuff up here" amount of crap, I mean a Collyer brothers amount of crap. You could grease yourself up, dive into a pile, and find yourself in a Plymouth Valiant... or perhaps in the living room of a smaller family that set up shop in one of the mounds... Anyway, we scraped off the top layer of one of the piles and carried it down to our front lawn on Saturday morning, and when all was said and done we'd made a couple hundred bucks, and I only had to carry up half of the stuff I brought down... plus, I discovered two things -

1. My kids are natural salespeople. "Customers!" they would whisper to each other every time someone walked down the road, and then they would start their pitch. "Are we selling these books dad?" Sam would say, "These are good ones, especially the gorilla one, remember that one Lily?" and she would chime in from the background, "Oh yeah, those are good..." and the dance would begin. "Have you seen this rocking horse, mister? I used to love this..." Worked like a charm, I tell ya. Fools and their money...

2. People are crazy. Case and point - the forty something year old guy that came as soon as we opened and zeroed in on a cardboard box filled with black and red balloons, some paper Chinese fans and lanterns, little containers of bubbles with Chinese lettering on them, and some new Chinese take-out containers. "Is all this being sold together?" he said, "Well sure", I answered, "it's Chinese New Year in a box" (Sara's name for it, can't take credit...).

... and four dollars later, he was happily strolling away completely prepared for an exceedingly lame Chinese New Year party eight months early.

Next up, a white van from some plumbing company pulls up, and an unshaven wifebeater-wearing plumber (I assume) hops out and starts foraging through the box of kid books.

"Any Curious George?" he says, "No", I answer, "we had a few in there, but someone just came and scooped them all up."

"That's a drag. I'm really into Curious George right now."

Luckily, my inner salesman managed to stop the "what the fuck?" that was on the tip of my tongue, and instead went with "You might want to try Eric Carle, he's a pretty good read..."

Armed with our new-found wealth, we saddled up the kids and went to the Devon Horse Show on Sunday, and immediately felt like some of the poorest people on the planet. There's lots to do there, so we didn't need to know anything about horses (or even watch the show for more than two minutes), but did learn one thing... The amount of money you have is directly proportional to the size of your hat. We didn't even have any hats, and there were people there who had extra chairs in case the weight of their hats became unbearable... some big hats, is all I'm saying.

Since then, I've just been staring at Sam's pre-k graduation picture. Up until we got it, I wasn't paying much attention to the whole graduation thing - because really, he's just moving on to kindergarten - but since we got the pictures back, I'm pretty freaked out. Every time I look at it I see him confident, happy, ready to move on... and every time I see it I just feel old... crap...

Oh, by the way, I scanned this picture into the computer through my printer... looks pretty good, doesn't it?