Article June 30, 2014 Issue

Lessons from a yard sale

Patrick M. Collins

This article was originally published in The Christian Science Monitor.

The signs were staked out in the front yard, and we were pretty much ready to go. This was our first—and, as it turned out, our only—yard sale. For a week or so we had been selecting things and putting prices on them. Our little daughter, Paige, was involved in selecting what should go, too. She had a large number of toys, dolls, and games that were no longer of interest to her, and she had been helping us decide which things to put out on the table.

The first woman who came to the sale immediately saw a doll that was lying at the end of one of the tables. She picked it up and just loved it at first sight. But as she came over to pay, Paige started to scream and cry: “That’s my baby doll—you can’t have it!” Shaking and sobbing, she made a pretty convincing display of how cruel and thoughtless her daddy was to let this happen.

The woman put the doll down and told us what she thought of parents who would sell their little child’s doll, using quite a few descriptors that, fortunately, have since been forgotten. She marched off in a huff before I’d had a chance to explain that Paige had gladly agreed during sorting that the doll should go to a new home. Mark that down as a “No Sale!”

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Article

The golden thread of liberty