The fancy term for “garage sale” is “estate sale,” and to be honest I’m not a fan of either. Rummaging around through someone else’s pile of discards looking for a bargain or an undiscovered treasure is not my idea of a fun Saturday. But while I am not a person who likes to go to estate sales, I am a person — if last weekend is any indication — who needed to have one.
From 9 a.m. Friday morning to 4 p.m. Sunday afternoon last weekend, I let strangers come into my living space and buy up a lot of my old stuff. I sold books and clothes, furniture and antiques, odd little items I’ve collected from my travels, art and wall hangings, three antique kilims I carried back from Antalya 20 years ago, and an enormous amount of kitchen junk you would never, in your wildest dreams, imagine that anybody else would pay for.
But they did. And not just that but old postcards, bar coasters, unused pads of paper, unwrapped notebooks, small bottles of bitters, pencils and pens, and those little Delft ceramic Dutch houses filled with gin you get if you fly business class on KLM.
I had stacks of old French ceramic platters, framed menus from 1940s-era Los Angeles restaurants, cufflinks and tie-tacks, gloves, six old Barbour raincoats, an Hermès scarf that someone left at my house years ago after a particularly unruly party, asparagus tongs, and an incense burner from Yemen with Arabic script that I’m pretty sure says “Death to America.” And of course there were two giant boxes with nothing but charger cables and connectors in every flavor of USB since 2002.
I sold it all last weekend.
It would have been a very traumatic weekend — as you might have guessed, I’ve collected a lot of stuff over the years, and it wouldn’t be unfair to say it’s been unhealthy — but the good news is that if you do a little digging, you can always find someone to do the hard stuff for you. Three weeks ago, I confronted — well, I was forced to confront — my general unwillingness to let anything go and my reflexive impulse to keep everything from the past, at which point I realized that I was living in what was essentially a Museum of Me. And it was time to take action. So I googled “estate sales near me” and found a soothing and kind soul who walked through my Institute of Neurotic Acquisitions with me and pronounced it all “very, very sellable.”
“Even the stupid cables?” I asked. She nodded. “People will buy anything,” she said.
We shook hands. The next week, she would appear in my house with an iPad (for looking up comparable prices) and a sheaf of color-coded stickers and methodically set a price on nearly every single one of my possessions. Occasionally I’d spot her assessing something that I instantly wanted to take back — No! Not that! I’m keeping the ashtray I stole from Alan Ducasse in Paris! — but she would simply stop, hold the item up, and fix me with a sad but wise expression until I took a few breaths, shrugged, and said Sell it. Sell it. Sell it all.
The day of the sale I got up very early, packed a weekend bag, and headed out. Throughout the day, I’d get text messages with photographs from the sales team — How about this? Is this for sale? — and occasionally I’d have to approve a particularly lowball price, but as the total sales amount kept rising, I realized that everything, including precious memories, has a price. Saturday and Sunday I kept my phone off and allowed the market to do its work. Sunday night I returned to a very dirty house — a lot of strangers walking through your place during a rainy weekend will do that — but also a pretty empty house. My footsteps made echoes. My life felt a lot lighter. The Metropolitan Museum of Me was now just a pocket-sized gallery, like the kind they sometimes have in a glass case at the library. It felt like I was ready to begin a new chapter, which is exactly what I want (and need) to do.
A friend asked, “What are you going to do with the money?”
And to be honest, I haven’t given it much thought. But I can tell you what I’m not going to do. I am not going to start all over again, buying things and keeping things and holding on to everything. Put it this way: If I fly KLM again, I am going to drink the gin on the way to baggage claim and throw the little Delft house in the garbage before I get into the taxi.
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Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
