Notes for a Divisive Day

"I like Betsy Ross as a model, the quilting bee, sitting around with your friends making art, asking what they think so that you get the benefit of everyone's opinions, and so its not just about you in your you-dom."--Artist Kiki Smith

We did a very intimate but public thing this weekend. We had a yard sale. An old-fashioned yard sale, with handmade signs staked out on busy Snelling Avenue, and masking tape stickers on our outgrown clothes: 2 for 25 Cents, or, for the men's suits: $5.00 Each. I think my son dreaded the idea: who puts their stuff out for sale anyway? It's November, for chrissakes, how broke are we? But it was the motivation I needed to get me back deep in the cedar closets and under the dusty beds to pull out knick-knacks we were all sick of anyway and paperback books the kids didn't want anymore, and certainly enough tee-shirts to outfit all the runners in the New York City Marathon. It felt so intimate because, well, our stuff tends to tell the stories of our lives and here we were displaying it all out in the open.

It was sort of strange and slightly embarassing, really, to set up this rag-tag of stuff at dawn Saturday morning. Our neighbor with the BMW slowed down to look and ask what we were doing. His "oh" response was two-toned and lyrical, like the kind you get from the church ladies when you tell them you don't believe in original sin.

My son was in charge of manning the money box and I kept up small talk with droppers-by. My husband kept us fed all day. We had antique dealers there an hour before "opening," who bought up some Deco-style vases and a funky old chair. We had a woman looking to buy paperbacks for a women's program she supports. We had a really scruffy fellow with dirty eyes open up all the ziplock bags filled with costume jewelry and surprise us by buying up a dollar's worth, including a gold angel pin you're suppose to wear for good luck. We had two recent Russian immigrants stop by to look at the men's suits but the suits were too small and the Russians kept apologizing for their poor English. We apologized for the suits not fitting. "I'm sorry. I wish we had a few larger ones for you." Neighbors walked up just to say hi and many of us had never met each other before. They said they loved our new porch and asked our son how old he was and wasn't he good with the math and change.

My son got $18 of spending money from the deal and the rest will go toward a new hockey net for him but he said he wouldn't have cared about the money because he "got to hang out with us all day and meet so many new people."

See, these are the days of free agency. An example: as I sit here, there must be five or six garbage haulers working our neighborhood this morning. Unlike the city of Minneapolis, St. Paul doesn't have a municipal waste contract so it's up to each homeowner and landlord to find our own trashman. Instead of pooling together, each of us chooses a hauler: huge corporate-owned BFI, or the small, local Ken Berquist & Son, Inc., or the fifty-year-old Highland Sanitation "Working for You."

My ears are filled with the roar of the morning garbage trucks, their hydraulic back ends pushing open and shut, beep-beeping in reverse. And then the morning vibrates with a different roar--the long orange schoolbuses, beginning with the Central High School bus at 7 a.m., Highland Senior High at 7:07, Mann Elementary at 7:54, Highland Elementary at 8:00, Adams Spanish Immersion at 8:10, Capitol Hill at 8:20. Thank God most private schools don't provide bus service. By the time I've read the paper and finished my tea I've heard up to ten old beasts barrel up and down our street.

This is the era of open enrollment. Find the right school for your kid, the best deal for your budget. Everyone picking and choosing what suits their individual needs best. Noise is not a factor in these decisions. Neither is community, it seems. Individually, we are our own hubs. I see the neighbors down the street use Simon Delivers and the freelancers on the corner have a busy Fed Ex account. UPS is seeing record revenues this year because none of us likes to get out to shop anymore. We're clicking through sale items late at night and having things shipped out one by one as we need them.

So I bring up the yard sale because it really hit home how much we hide behind our stuff, in our dens and family rooms, and how little chance we get to just be out there open to the world. Sure we join churches and book clubs and PTAs. But so much of those organized activities are just that--organized. We're not mingling much with people not like us. We're not forging common ground by simply being willing to sit out in the open--just to see who might come up to talk.