A garage sale is truly a fascinating idea. It’s the act of someone collecting all the material burdens in their life and putting them out on their lawn in the hopes that someone will come along, find just what they are looking for and impulsively purchase it for something close to 5% of what the item originally cost. When you look at what it means to be a customer at a garage sale under these specific brackets, Dad is the quintessential garage sale customer. If you and your family have ever taken the chance at selling your stuff on your front lawn, you may have imagined some hunched over raving lunatic gently inspecting your Garfield bookends or the 1970s model electric hand mixer you’ve had for decades but couldn’t throw out. Said, lunatic may have given you a stern and genuinely decent offer for it and you may not know it, but you’re at that moment envisioning my father.

Like most people who compulsively keep things they find on the ground, Dad started off just as a collector. Apropos of nothing at all he decided one day he was going to start collecting old iron church bells. There was something he saw in them that got him to rethink the design and look of the buildings on his property. For years we had been incorporating cupolas to the roofs and I guess he just saw them as unfinished without a bell inside of them to complete the whole look. Dad had a process for finding and acquiring them with the intentions, it would seem, of putting them up somewhere on the property. The problem with dad’s plans and logic is they don’t always end up at the finish line. Dad would go to a garage or an estate sale and find one he was interested in, he’d ask how much, work out a deal, and the bell would be his.

The purchase and exchange of money was a symbol, a catalyst for a great structural masterpiece that would bless the tops of his buildings and float in the sky, always smiling with the sun across its iron face. Ropes and pulleys would be utilized in order to allow the bells to howl throughout the property with monotonous notes that would blare through the orchards and off the walls of the various buildings. The problem, as it were would always show itself once dad was confronted with figuring out a way to get a 700 pound iron bell into his truck and drive it home. This process would prove challenging enough, so the idea of a vertical ascent all the way to the top of a two story house was certainly an ambitious idea in and of itself. Despite the difficulty, ambition be damned in the face of a good deal. Dad would find sales and if there was a bell that he thought needed to live on his property, it became his. And while they never made it to the roof, they were still given a place to live; a garage, a shed or just next to the driveway sitting atop the wood palette it was sold on.

The bells were at first a way to please mom and her sense of decor but soon became an obsession of his. Always a generous man, and never knowing how to navigate around a jewelry store or shopping mall he would go to yard sales looking for something nice or pretty for his wife. What he wound up finding most of the time was something he actually wanted for himself but that didn’t stop him from giving them as a gift to mom. For a while it was endearing. He’d show up with a vase or a broken lamp that mom had no interest in putting anywhere in the house and she did see it as a nice gesture. When he started coming home with old farm machinery however, she had to at least make an effort to say to him if he wanted to buy something he should just buy it and he didn’t have to keep pawning it off as a gift for her. At that point she didn’t quite realize what she had said to him. What she said was she wanted him to enjoy his newfound hobby. What he heard was an open invitation to buy just about anything he could trade money for.

After the gates were open he started buying tools. The tools he found were early analog versions of the electric power tools he already owned. Sanders, drills and saws kept making their way into the garage that were powered by hand crank and elbow grease.

The next thing he started collecting was produce scales. There was the large flat scale that weighed about as much as an AC unit. There also was the yellow one with a basket fixed to the top of it, that also weighed as much as an AC unit. The white one with the numbers that spun like a slot machine was purchased after the hanging produce scale like you see at the supermarket. After those was what the seller called a “Justice Style” scale with two little dishes on each side, the “speedometer style” with a needle that bounced left to right and a black iron scale with a clock face that stood roughly three feet tall. Looking at it, you could imagine a hobbit flexing his muscles standing on it for a pre-fight weigh in. There was about a dozen more of various styles and colors. Each of them was unique in their own way except for the fact that none of them really worked and no one really knew how to zero them.

When he grew tired of scales he switched to old glass bottles, old kitchenware, old knives, old books and old boxes of old tools. Before long his taste included anything else that caught his eye and not limited to one specific thing at a time.

If there was such a thing as too much, my dad never saw it on the horizon. After a while Dad developed a habit of buying just about anything he could at least try to pay for. If he could acquire it in bulk all the better. One item he was especially good at finding on a whim would be multi-gallon sized buckets of Dubble Bubble chewing gum. The massive vessel would be filled to the top with individually wrapped pieces of gum and while the gesture was always nice, it still begged the question what does one do with three hundred and sixty pieces of pink bubble gum? Despite moms protest when he would bring them home, he insisted it was a great find and I would be incredibly happy to receive it. My friends at college were getting care packages of homemade cookies, Starbucks gift cards, and other various goodies. I meanwhile would get a box from home that looked best for shipping a human head; upon opening it I would realize it was yet another tub of chewing of gum that I could not confirm whether or not was found at a garage sale.

I remember one day he tried pawning on me a crystal looking door knob. It was actually just a large hunk of glass that was cut to look like a jewel. Its purpose for being forged it seemed was to fool the buyer into thinking they had a functional piece of treasure that would allow them to get from one room to another.