One man’s trash

Like many Australians, we don’t put our car in the garage.

No – that would be far too sensible.

Besides, there’s no space amongst the boxes of Christmas decorations, old books, paint tins, barely-used golf clubs, and bodies of our enemies.

(Well, we couldn’t bury them in the backyard because of all the sandstone*.)

We realised it had gone too far when we lost one of the kids in there for a couple of days**.

So, one man’s trash being another man’s treasure and all that, we decided to have a cleanout.

I can’t bear to take anything to the tip because a) it’s such a waste and b) it smells.

Last year I spent a week trying to find a good home for the clothes and toys the kids had grown out of.

Charities won’t accept hard toys due to health and safety regulations, and many hospitals won’t take soft toys because they’re perceived to be unclean.

This time we tried our luck on E-Bay.

My sister-in-law swears she makes a fortune selling second hand t-shirts to young country blokes who can’t get to the cool surf shops.

Being computer illiterate, it took four hours to lodge the golf clubs onto the site.

Then I made the crucial mistake of underestimating the postage.

The clubs sold for $15.

It cost $80 to send them to Queensland.

Net loss (or net debt gross public and private, as Barnaby Joyce would say), $65.

Sigh.

Being short of cash this particular week, hubby decided to sell his childhood skateboard.

Forgoing E-Bay, we took the ratty old thing to a dude at the local skatie shop.

His eyes almost popped out of his head.

“Man, that’s vintage!” he gnarled.

(I know – that’s not the proper use of the word. But he said it in the same way a surfer would say “gnarly”. It that onomatopœia? Or just bad English?)

“Are those stickers for real?” he asked. “I mean aww-thentic?”

“Um, yep,” Jase said, wondering why anyone would counterfeit a sticker.

“Do you have any idea how much this thing is worth,” young bug-eyed continued.

“Mmmm – 50 bucks?” he shrugged.

“I reckon you’d get $2000 for this!”

Well, you could have blown us over with a feather.

I was calculating how we could spend the money – kids’ school clothes, a nice dinner for the two of us, telephone bills, a new nasal hair trimmer, all that glamorous stuff – when Jase started shaking his head.

“Nah, I think I’ll keep it,” he said. “It’ll be nice to pass down one day to Taj.”

Our garage is still as full as it ever was.

But now I view it as a repository for priceless artifacts, instead of a load of old rubbish.

*If you are a member of the Homicide Squad, this is a joke.

**If you work for the Department of Community Services, this is also a joke.