May 17, 2003 John and I have been trading silly e-mails about what would constitute a redneck mojo--stuff like Harley Davidson gas caps, black velvet, garlic, wallet chains, chicken blood, and other half-redneck, half-black magic items. It’s gotten me to thinking about forms of magic, signs from the universe, the spiritual world, what the rational world terms coincidence but perhaps isn’t. Almost every Saturday for the past few weeks, CP and I have started our mornings by racing around to various yard sales, in search of resalable items and in my case, an unlikely mother lode of fine wool yarn and smooth wooden knitting needles, all at reasonable prices. I get up early, copy down addresses from the online classifieds, and after waiting for CP to finish his three cups of coffee, we get in the car and go. I drive, and CP navigates, though most often, the carefully printed sheet I’ve made that morning is stuffed in his shirt pocket, or lost on the floorboard, and by the time he’s dug it out and consulted it, I’ve sped past my turnoff in some meandering subdivision. A few years ago, Heather and I would frequent sales and always find scads of interesting things. Those were fun days; she’d come for the weekend, and on Saturday morning we’d take off in my Festiva, the perfect vehicle for haphazard and sometimes dangerous off-road yard sale parking, the Traveling Wilburys on the tape deck. We would go all over town and talk to people and buy their stuff--pink Chuck Taylors, a brass salamander that I still have, unusual books like the 70s era manual I found that explained how build bunks into the side of your van and use it as a camper to travel around the U.S. We would fill up the back seat with whatever caught our respective eyes, and still have enough money left over for a Whopper and fries at noon. It’s hardly worth the time and gas to drive around to sales these days. There’s always the hope, though, that you’ll hit the jackpot, and like so many other gamblers, that is what has kept us going. We continue squandering our potentially peaceful Saturday mornings and ending up tired and frustrated and regretting the whole escapade as the dreams of antique chairs and merchant tokens and vintage knitting needles rapidly fade, but by the next weekend, hope is renewed, and we’re off again. The goal of a yard sale should be to get rid of your belongings and make some beer and pizza money, and not expect vast riches from your castoffs. Others disagree, because we see worn paperbacks with 75 cent and up price tags, old TVs priced just a few dollars shy of a new one from K-Mart, homemade mix tapes for a dollar and up. Doing this ensures that at the end of the day, you’ll be boxing the bulk of your things up and carting them back to the musty confines of your basement, or foisting them off on Goodwill. CP is especially cynical about people who overprice and also live in chi-chi neighborhoods. He thinks they assume that everyone will want to pay outrageous prices for their unwanted things simply because they live in these places—that the masses will dreamily flock to a garage sale in Hyde Park, drawn as if in a trance by the hallowed address, and oooo and ahhh at the items there, anxious for upper class to rub off on them as they snatch up old sequin-and-felt Santas and browse the ubiquitous honeycomb of corporate coffee cups. I think that if the cosmos gives repeated signs, you should pay attention, regardless of the potential reward of doggedly continuing a largely unpleasant experience. There have been signs that we should stop this yard sale routine, big signs. One is the fact that we continue to run into sales like I’ve mentioned and those where people try to sell stuff that should be tossed, like dirty high chairs with cracked plastic trays, splintered shelving units, rusting, flaked tools, and tons and tons of outdated clothing—not trendy, retro stuff, but thin t-shirts with faded logos, and shapeless, pilled sweaters. However, we continue to follow impromptu car pools from one sale to the next, park sometimes a block away, all for the privilege of riffling through someone’s abandoned exercise equipment and plastic Barney place settings. The bottom line is that it’s been mostly unsuccessful as far as finding anything good. There have also been ‘incidents’. Two weeks ago, a white haired man in a big, white Oldsmobile began to back out of a driveway without looking and almost hit CP, who was waiting to cross the street, and of course, wasn’t watching behind him. At another sale that weekend, a huge, loud guy with frizzy hair stepped in front of me and performed some blocking maneuver, his arms folded into chicken wings, as if to keep me from beating him to a table containing electric cup warmers and amber glass ashtrays, and some refrigerator magnets he must have coveted. Puh-leez. The worst yard sale unpleasantness was actually in New York a couple of years ago. The police were at the house, and there was some argument about a dog—there was an older woman, and a young boy, who was flipping the bird at her. She said to him, “Don’t do that. You know I love you,” while the kid, unblinkingly, kept his middle finger thrust in her face. The kid’s mother sat in a lawn chair, one leg folded under her, apparently unruffled by the scene, while she spoke quietly to the officers next to her. All this was happening while people were in their front yard, looking at their sale items. Today, though, today was the final straw. If we ever needed a clearer sign that yard sales are not worth the trouble, we got it today. There were two sales listed in our neighborhood, and that was about the limit we were willing to explore today, since a steady rain has been falling since early morning. We drove around a little bit, past the address on our own street, where there was no sign of activity, then took off to the east side of our subdivision, where we saw a sale I hadn’t had written down. That one was pleasant in spite of the rain. Two women had rigged up clear plastic with two by fours over a few tables outside their garage, and they were cheerful in an isn’t-this-an-adventure sort of way. A little girl, about second grade or so, came into the garage with CP and me, and kept up an engaging, childish patter—“I don’t like flea combs,” she said, turning over a small one on a table. I asked her if she had a cat, and she said she did, but it was at her Grandma’s. When CP decided to buy a little pitcher, the girl eagerly took it and offered to put it on the checkout table, and when we were ready to go, her mother let her take the money and make the change. After wishing them good luck, we left there and backtracked to a sale just around the corner of our house, though it didn’t look promising. Their two outdoor tables were covered in plastic, and it looked as though the people were taking things back into the garage. I let CP out while I tried to get the car off the road a little more, and by the time I got out, he was coming back, because the people had given up and were putting everything away. We got back in and I said we should drive down to the end of our street and see if that one was going yet. We passed the house…still no activity. I began to smell something terrible; at first I thought it smelled like dirty diapers. About that time, CP said, “I smell something bad.” I asked him, while I looked down through the steering wheel at my own, fairly clean shoes, “You didn’t step in something, did you?” He turned his foot sideways and answered, “Oh, yes, I did!” It was dog shit. Thank goodness we were just at the end of our street. The smell was indescribable, regular dog shit smell plus some hideously sickening farm-like smell, like maybe the dog had eaten through a bale of wild onions and grass. C.P. yelled all the way home; I only caught snippets, since I was fighting to keep from gagging. “People who let their dogs just…it couldn’t be any worse…Damn!…Damn!” I kept yelling at him to get out of the car, even though I was still driving it and we weren’t yet home. It was that bad; I hardly knew what I was saying. When I finally did pull in and stop, he sat there for a split-second too long before opening the door, and I yelled at him again to get out. It was then I glanced down and saw the extent of the mess. There was dog shit all the way up the side of his right shoe, and it was also on the carpeting underneath the door, smeared there like a big wad of plaster that you scrape off onto a wall before you spread it around. I ran gagging into the house. I have never seen such a huge, awful mess. It must have been a dog of Clifford's proportions that left it. Signs from the universe. If you don’t pay attention to them, or you chalk them up to coincidence or your own mistaken intuition, they get less and less subtle. They become shockingly clear and overpowering, and cannot, under any circumstances, be ignored. All the wooden knitting needles and fine wool in the world aren’t worth going through that again.