The Estate Sale Diaries-April 10, 2012, and a Most Peculiar Scene at the Park

Early today I drove out Highway 70 to southwest Davidson County to go to a moving sale at the home of someone in the Music Business. Though I live in Nashville, I know little of the Country Music scene, and I was curious to see how its nobility lived.

Modestly, in this case. The house , surrounded by forest and pastures. The drive, connected to the paved country road by a stone bridge over a creek. This home was no mansion. Its kitchen was no culinary temple. Yet, like the condo estate sale I went to several weeks ago in Bellevue, this sale was all about the walls and what was hanging on them.

In one room a museum sized painting with a museum sized price tag of $25,000. Not far from it, another painting priced at $17,000.00.

This baffled me. I have been to many estate and yard and moving sales, and have seen many paintings, but never any costing more than $1500 dollars. I do not doubt that art can be pricey. I know this because my father was an art dealer who scoured New England for paintings to auction in Boston and to sell at the galleries on Newbury Street. But these prices? In the setting of a tag sale? It made me wonder who the estate sale company thought might come wandering in with a spare $25,000.

Certainly, not me. I was not even willing to buy a fancy English teacup and saucer for twenty bucks. I left empty handed, as did the handful of people there with me in the first hour of the first day of this sale.


From a sociological standpoint, the sale was not a waste of time, and from an ornithological one, it was a success- for I heard the first Parula warbler of the year along the creek.


Figuring that more warblers were back, I later took the hounds to Edwin Warner Park for a walk.

Oh, why do I ever think leaving my camera at home is a good idea? A few weekends ago I did the same thing and stumbled in on the Nashville Kurdish Council's Annual Spring Picnic. And today-

A convention of another sort- 50 Comcast and X-finity cable TV trucks and their crews lined up at one small picnic area along the river. And I thought a $25,000 painting at a glorified yard sale was strange!

Woe to the poor sucker who put off lunch waiting for the cable man to arrive today!

And what was going on here? A prayer meeting? A motivational speaker? Free high speed Internet for the squirrels? Who knows? Surely the whole fleet was there. Every truck in the city. What a mystery.


Later, hoping that adventure would come in threes, I drove over to the library to pick up an inter-library loan. In the new non-fiction section I found a book I hoped would rival "On the Road" or Ian Frazier's "Great Plains". Blurbs on the dust jacket brought great expectations.

The book was "Lost in America- A Dead End Journey", by Colby Buzzell. The author drove out through Recession America to meet its people.

I made it through three chapters, then put it on the hall table return pile.

The book was as enervating as the author's wasted nights getting wasted and meeting other people in bars who were in the same depressed condition. To use the F word repeatedly as noun, verb, and adverb reveals to the reader that one does not have much to say, and that the "Dead-End Journey" of the title was apt.