The Great Glebe Garage Sale...

Every year on the last Saturday in May my neighbourhood has a garage sale. This is an old, affluent, interesting area of Ottawa and many, many households participate. The crowds come out in droves, especially when the weather is good.

I love looking at people's old junk, which is what most of it is. Sometimes someone comes along with real merchandise; there's a vendor of Indian goods who has been coming for a while, and I almost bought a car sticker that says "namaste". What would I do with a sticker? I could make a bookmark of it. Then I thought: I could just as easily print "namaste" on a piece of paper myself. So I didn't get it. The thing I like about that guy's section: he always burns incense.

That isn't the only feast for the senses. Some people produce live music on their lawns - a swing band here, a violinist there. Sometimes there are singers with microphones. I head someone complain that the Liberal party was selling bottles of water - selling it, not giving it away - I wondered why he expected otherwise. Every corner of Bank St. as far as I could see had someone selling hot dogs, sausages and cold drinks.

Not that it was a hot day. The sun was hot but the wind was fierce and in the shadow of the large apartment buildings, it was liek winter. But standing in the sun on the north-south streets, it was summer again. Go figure.

I went looking for certain potential items I hoped to find:

• a small teapot


• a small vase


• visual material for my scrapbooks


• a standing lamp, to illuminate that corner of the living room beside the sofa where I like to lounge and read in the evening - fine when it's light, but once the sun goes down, my table lamp just isn't enough to read by


• a plastic tray for flatware, for my new set of forks and knives


• a copy of Fowler's English Usage, a book about HTML code, and a good French dictionary

What did I find? A number of ten-cent magazines for material for my scrapbook. A book on HTML for $1. A set of mats for hot food, ten for a dollar. I found that this year I could generally divide the items for sale into three categories: old junk, outgrown kids' toys and clothes, and expensive antiques selling at the kind of prices you'd expect expensive antiques to be. Most of what I call 'old junk' was either knick-knacks that no one in their right mind would have bought in the first place - or outmoded technology like old computer keyboards or cassette tapes of music popular in the eighties or paperback bestsetters from a couple of decades ago - the same ones on every lawn. I saw one woman looking seriously at "Clan of the Cave Bear" for $1. "Yes, but would you read it?" her boyfriend was asking her. Why does he think she wouldn't? I wondered. Maybe she doesn't read fiction. Maybe she doesn't have time to read fiction. It didn't sound as if he thought she was too intellectual for it. Maybe he just thought it wasn't something he would read, but then, he wasn't the right demographic for it even when it was written.

A fourth category: Christmas ornaments, mostly trees, wreaths and decorations.

I found two places where they were selling comics. The first was $1 per comic; they were the kind of comic you'd see in the $1 bin at Silver Snail, but they weren't in good shape - didn't warrant the price at all. There were a couple of bent, once-damo Detective and Batman comics from the eighties or nineties that I might have bought if they were ten cents or ven a quarter each. Another guy was selling comics for slightly more, but they were good comics - Marvel comics - including some items like Frank Miller Daredevil comics for $15, a great deal. But I already had all of those.

My largest purchases were two video-tapes for $2 each: a Ewan McGregor movie, "The Serpent's Kiss" and Sophie Moreau movie, "Revenge of the Musketeers."

After I wandered for a bit, and helped Marcelle sell some Star Trek merchandise, and saw my old friend Janet with her boyfriend Ronn as she was browsing, I gave up on looking for things I wasn't finding, and went home - only to discover my telephone wasn't working. It had been misbehaving a little lately, but I'd paid no attention. Now it was dead. I headed out reluctantly to the hardware store for a new phone, remembering that only a couple of hours earlier I'd seen someone selling a phone which he claimed worked for 25 cents. I tried to go past the same place. They were just finishing up their sales, offering bags of stuff for $2. I said, jokingly, to the man still there (as I peered at a rather nice thermos), "If you have a telephone, I'll go for it."

He had a telephone. So I got three matching juice glasses, three matching wine glasses, a thermos and my telephone. And the telephone works. And I didn't even need to walk all the way to the hardware store. Now, this phone isn't very pretty, but it matches the computer it sits on, and it works. I may replace it soon, but meanwhile... it works.

Coming home from the opera at about 11 p.m., Donna and I were looking into boxes of stuff left over from the sales and left for people to take if they wanted it. She needed a lampshade. I explained my need for a standing lamp. She saw a lampshade that was broken, then another that was too big. I saw a lampshade that was too small and made a joke about it, then realized it was attached to a standing lamp, which I promptly took with me - along with a plastic flatware tray, a book about yoga, and a roll of placemats.

The lamp works, and with a new lampshade (culled from a table lamp I already have and don't use), it looks quite nice in the corner of my living room by my harp.

I guess no one ever throws out Fowler's English Usage.

Don Giovanni

Since I become crazy over opera I've wanted to see a live opera, but there's precious little of it to go to in these parts, and I couldn't afford a ticket to Rigoletto when Opera Lyra did it a month or two ago. I also have issues with Rigoletto that have to do with a grade eight music teacher who didn't like me, but that's another issue. Nor can I afford the train or air fare to Toronto or Detroit or New York or Paris wherever there might actually be a real professional opera going on.

But last night I got to see - and hear - Don Giovanni by Mozart. It was terrific. Funny and smart and the music is - well, it's Mozart. Now, this wasn't a professional production. It was done by the Pellegrini players which, I am told, is a company formed by professional opera singer Maria Pellegrini so her son will have a venue in which to sing. The son, of course, played Don Giovanni and he played it well.

Sang it damn well, too, in my opinion. So that instead of being bored by my first post-conversion taste of live opera, I had a wonderful time. The set was almost no set at all and the costumes were cheesy - though Don Giovanni himself had a rather nice doublet. They needed a good stage director and better blocking but the singing was good - htat is obviously where the expertise and skill went - and it worked far better than a slicker production with poorer singing would have.

So. I wonder when the next opera I can get to will be? This was a nice place to start.