A fellow blogger pointed this post by Tim Barcz out to me last week. Sad and poignant, Selling Your Life For A Quarter at a Time is one of those posts that stop and make you think. My friend also noted, "Unfortunately, the spammers also found the essay and decided to fill it with garbage links. So much for poignant." Don’t even get me started about that.
"Last Saturday we again noticed a lot of people over at Carl’s house. This time though there was a new sign out front in addition to the "For Sale by owner", this one read "Tag Sale". Sarah and I walked over and looked through the garage and then followed some other patrons into the house. I was somewhat surprised at what I saw. Everything was in it’s place, where Carl had presumably left it. Only now, on each item there was a piece of masking tape indicating a price. We looked around, feeling odd the whole time. The difficult part for me was entering Carl’s room. There in his closet, a nice suit, for a few bucks. Shoes, nice, black, obviously cared for by their shining exterior were on sale for 50 cents. There on the shelf in the closet, a hat. The kind of hat you don’t see anymore and only seems appropriate on men over 70 years old. The same hat I see my grandfather wearing to church on Sunday mornings in pictures. The hat, a mere 25 cents."
Humans are collectors, aren’t we. Today I thought fleetingly about taking every book down in my library for example. Maybe I would put them back in the categories, Music, Computers, Fiction, and Vintage. Yeah, you bet. But not this weekend because we will be visiting with our son’s family and new baby Addie.
I’ve been collecting sheet music lately in three categories; sax quartet, jazz combo, and big band. The music is in a series of file cabinets. I wonder if anyone would save them and use them after Suzy and I’m gone. And then there’s my music method book, CD, and musical instrument collections. I remember when the Leblanc Music company went out of business. They bulk sold most of the instruments from the museum! I’m guessing the vintage but pristine saxes and clarinets went for pennies on the dollar.
Okay now, I know that the value of any person can’t/shouldn’t be added up based on her/his belongings. But still the idea of people pawing through the belongings of a recently deceased person is kinda depressing. So I guess I need to give everything away before I die so that maybe a sax player will inherit my sax and a collector will cherish that vintage clarinet from the 1800s. That assumes that I have some warning before I kick the bucket.
The Bis Key Chronicles 
Then, you would have understood my sadness and pity when I went with a friend to my first and last Estate sale. I blogged about it and several said they were brought to tears. *I* was brought to tears, then at the house I was in, and again writing about it. It still has the power to affect me.
I am working on downsizing. I hate the thought of people pawing through my things.
I have a friend who’s a firefighter. He told me that there are the four P’s that they save. In order, they are People first, Pets second, Photographs third, and Possessions last. Funny how photographs mean so much to people. But what becomes of those photos when no one is alive who remembers the people in the photos?
Greetings.
What a sad bog…
love, daphne
I once went into an estate sale and it was almost exactly as described above. I felt like an intruder into someone else’s private life. I don’t think I’ll be doing that again. It was so sad to see these objects that at one point meant something special to the owner. How do you price something like that without feeling shallow?
I once went into an estate sale and it was almost exactly as described above. I felt like an intruder into someone else’s private life. I don’t think I’ll be doing that again. It was so sad to see these objects that at one point meant something special to the owner. How do you price something like that without feeling shallow?
Have thought of this before, and have seen the unfortunate consequences of the same, in estate sales, and family conflicts over such things. My thinking is along the same line as yours.