Awhile back, Nan at Letters from a Hillfarm posted a photo of the most inviting Adirondack chair. It brought to mind a pair of weathered Adirondacks I saw for sale at the local thrift shop - they were $36 for both. I decided to sleep on it and stopped back the next morning, only to find them gone, their two marks still left in the grass. That day I vowed to never let that happen again - if I see something I love and can afford it, it comes home with me immediately.
I read about a similar experience in one of my favorite books - Garage Sale America by Bruce Littlefield. I don't buy many books because I'm always visiting the library, but this one I loved enough that I needed to own it. Here's his tale of "the one that got away."
There's nothing worse than the one that got away. It haunts you for weeks like a bad dream, eats away at your psyche like a termite on softened wood. I recently found myself attracted to a delicately aged pair of Bert and Ernie puppets sitting on the lawn of an otherwise innocuous sale of miscellany. My brother and I had them growing up. Ernie slept on the bottom bunk with Brian; Bert slept up top with me. I didn't buy them, leaving them to be taken by some more thoughtful brother, and I've regretted it ever since. It would have been fun for me to send Brian an Ernie with a mysterious note - definitely worth the ten bucks. It was a real missed opportunity, and I try not to let those happen too often.
-Bruce Littlefield
2 comments:
Oh, the sixty dollar exquisite watercolor in a small gallery in Nantucket...but I was twentysomething and money was so tight!
I vow I will not talk myself out of stuff since I didn't get a book at a Salvation Army that was a first edition (went back and someone else had snapped it up) but I keep doing it anyway! The worst is my own garage sales - where I have sold stuff I later really wish I hadn't!
I've sold things too that I wish I hadn't - the memory of a t-shirt from the 70s with a beaded peacock on the front is an especially painful example!
Post a Comment