Every time I pass a sign for a garage sale I think of my father. Back when I was young, my father would be on the lookout for garage sale weekends. Usually falling around holidays like Memorial Day, Father’s Day, or the fourth of July. My father would keep a keen eye on what towns were holding them and when. If our busy soccer or my track schedule allowed it, we would hit the road and head to the sales. Sometimes we knew what we were looking for and other times it was pure luck of the draw. Most of the time it was whatever caught our eye.
The brass bed my father bought me for $40.00, that was pure coincidence. How every time I drive by that house, I still think of my father talking down the price to the man who was selling it. The man listened, agreed, and that’s how I ended up with the bed I slept in for all my teenage years. I loved that bed. I can still remember the sound of the brass against the wall when I climbed in and out of it, the piece of garage sale silk that I threaded through the headboard bars. Our collection of garage sale treasures ranged from little to large. The art that still hangs from my walls, the mirrors, the bottles that line the hop house windowsills, the chairs that hang from the floorboards. The old hats I would collect, the silk gloves, the tiny purses, and of course the records. I was always on the lookout for records. At a time when record players and records were not yet cool again, everybody was trying to get rid of theirs, and that’s how I acquired mine. Anything from Fleetwood Mac, to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones to Jefferson Airplane. $0.50 a piece, 4 for a $1.00, never did I spend over a couple of bucks for records that now go for $30 or more. I was in my shopping heaven. Why pay full price when you could have a reused copy for much less. That has always been, and still is my buyer mentality.
It’s easy to say that my father taught me well. He taught me how to bargain, how to never pass a sale without checking it out first. Always with the moto in the back of our heads of “one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.” It was true. Every word of it. I decorated my room with our dollar finds and he adorned his hop house, our garage turned antique shop. We were the perfect garage sale pair. I helped him get the good deals and he spotted the things I missed. When we pulled in the driveway with a car full of “stuff” my mother would look at us all confused, not always understanding how fulfilled and overly satisfied we were with our exciting finds. My father would lay all his new goods out on the lawn, under the maple trees, to inspect and analyze each one. If I missed a sale with him, he would always wait and leave it out for me to see. Now when he adds new antiques to the bar, or rearranges them differently in the hop house, he is always first to show me when I come home. Taking me on a tour, pointing out what’s new, or asking me if I remember where this or that came from. It’s a ritual of ours, fawning over what we truly love.
My favorite sale, which wasn’t even a sale at, but more like a festival of sales, was Bouckville. Bouckville was read about and celebrated in magazines like Country Living and raved about on TV shows like American Pickers. Bouckville was a national yard sale on steroids, stretching for miles down Route 20 in upstate New York. Luckily for us, Bouckville was only an hour or so away and every summer we carved out Bouckville weekend to make sure we could always attend. There were themed tents, bargain bins, all of the good stuff we would find at garage sales quadrupled. Bouckville only had the best of the best. It had to in order to live up to its high standards. Fur coats, guitars with broken strings, more records, oriental rugs, more glass bottles, tools, tables, cabinets, milk crates that I would use for storage totes in college, more art that I would hang from my walls, ornate wooden frames, more purses, more hats, a step stool I would use as my nightstand table. Bouckville for us was like Christmas. Our favorite part of summer where it was just the two of us, blaring Springteen on the way there and all the way home. For lunch, always going to the same food tent, the one that served us pulled pork sandwiches and ½ ears of corn. Our visits to Bouckville were pure magic, always leaving us with the yearning to go back next year. The last time I attended Bouckville with my father was 10 years ago. Those days feel so ancient to me now. If there’s one place I wish I still went to today it would be Bouckville. I wonder if he feels the same way.
It’s interesting to think of how traditions form and end. How garage sales were such a big and exciting part of my life years ago, and now I can’t even remember the last one I went to. It’s more than the garage sales though, it’s this love my father instilled in me for all things old. Antiques. Unique treasures. We weren’t per se looking for things to fulfill a need, it was more like those things found us and made a home in our hearts, filling the nooks of our past lives. My father allowed me to find my own style, letting me explore the old and so much of our ancient ways, ways of living that no one wanted to live and be a part of anymore. We were the ones who wanted to hold on to it. Embrace the old, in our new ways. By adorning barns and bedrooms with the one-of-a-kind artifacts we found. Old souls for life, you could say.
To this day, my bedroom beams with an array of things. My walls covered with frames of old paintings, collaged with pictures of when I was young, pink records, cowgirl hats, a map of the West Indies, inspirational quotes, gold covered mirrors, rave fans, prayer flags, concert posters. So much of who my father showed me to be and live like stays with me and is who I am today. This girl made up of not one, but many things. Not just one style, one hobby, one love, but a little bit of all of it. My style is no style, but all styles put together. Mixed into one, just like my father’s. How we have come to share our love for this dying art, that we ever so strongly want to keep alive. How the old to us always looks like the brand new. How to us, it just feels natural.