“The worst trouble a man can be in, I think, is to have one hope left, and that a hope of something so inherently improbably that he knows deep in his heart it won’t happen… Three feeble gardenias on a vendor’s tray in the rain an hour after curtain time; a cup of fly-specked jelly beans in a shop window: these are the merchant’s last precarious handhold on the window ledge. The cruelest merchandise is a talent for which there is no demand.” –Joseph Liebling, from “People in Trouble”

Estates sales, we might remember, are a business. They’re not merely a group of grieving individuals piling the detritus of the recently deceased on tables and then pocketing cash. As I mentioned last week, there are collectors and antique store dealers plundering this stuff to fill their stores, real and virtual, but let’s not forget that the sales themselves are run by men and women who depend upon their success for their livelihoods.

And there are some weekends where I don’t how the hell they manage. This was one of them.

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There are moments in the estate sale biz when you find yourself thoroughly outflanked by the likes of the professional. When you realize that for some people, estate sale carousing is a serious undertaking, it’s a man’s bread-and-butter, it puts the kids through college, pays the mortgage, and keeps one in beer and skittles, etc., etc.

I was surprised as all hell to run into the mother of all collectors’ sales, in Spring Lake Park, and that a rare Friday evening sale, advertising antiques, turned out to have virtually no collectors at all. This was a busy weekend, where we saw virtually every type of sale imaginable–seven total with Mayor Mike Haeg and ESC guest star Holly Petersen, including two collectors’ sales, two shoes off sales, two warehouse sales, and a damnable Craigslist sale that I would beware of in the future. But we came away with a bonanza of sorts.

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Who likes to shop? I sure don’t. Clothes shopping, shoe shopping, and, cripes almighty, shopping for towels or linens of any sort drives me up a wall. A set of sheets costs a hundred dollars. Do you know how many books you can buy for a hundred bucks?

Ah, but therein exists yet another blessed joy of estate sale-ing. You can buy most of your clothes (no underwear or sox, natch), your linens, and especially your Goddam sheets at estate sales and get the benefit of wandering through the lives of your fellow citizens. You get your product and you get a story. That beats the Mall of America, every time.

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Suits, skulls, knives, ivory. Life magazines, hobo biographies, wife-swapping novels, cookbooks. 50s pinups, maps, Ansel Adams’ originals, a 3-D image of Mao Tse Tung. Never used food processors, broken record players, balls and bats and backgammon sets.

What do all of these have in common? They’ve all been found at estate sales, man.

Every weekend, my wife and I pile into the Honda and drive all over the Twin Cities, classified ads in hand, looking for estate sales. Being a teacher and an underemployed novelist means that we don’t have tons of money, so estate sales help us buy things–like a new Kitchen Aid food processor–for at least a fifth of their value. As I look around my house, I notice that many of the things I own–from the books on the shelves to the fancy plates to the clothes on my back–are from estate sales. Yes, that means I’m probably wearing the clothes of the dead.

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