Betty Tsang’s Estate Sale

 Betty Tsang’s Estate Sale

 

At Betty Tsang’s estate sale there are slow cookers, Instant Pots, and mandolin graters. On the counter are the everyday cutlery and the formal silverware. There are the special place settings, the weekday dishes, and the various plastic cups picked up from special events and fast-food restaurants.  Lots and lots and lots of empty pill bottles, melatonin yellow, catching and refracting late afternoon sunlight, making willow leaf patterns on the faded kitchen walls. The living room shag carpet is thick, like the rough collar outside the putting circle on a golf course. In the basement are golf clubs, several sets, and croquet mallets and primary color wooden balls. Like new! $20. Pay with cash or check. No credit! In the center of one room is a hospital bed. The shades are drawn. Surrounding the bed are stackers filled with more clean pill bottles, Chux underpads, plastic urinals, and pink water/ice pitchers. A wheel chair, folded, lines one wall, along with a walker with tennis ball feet. In the main bedroom are shelves arranged with travel and language books, textbooks on computer programming, Vintage Classic paperbacks, Nixon’s memoir, and Chuck Colson’s Born Again. In the garage is a rusted mountain bike, an assortment of skis, boots and bindings, and years of collected nails, nuts, and bolts. There is a bucket of used inner tubes—to be repaired.

What to make of dreams, desires, wishes, good intentions . . . ?

I buy a croquet set. That now sits in my basement.