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The Brussels Post, 1981-09-23, Page 4Published at BRUSSELS, ONTARIO every Wednesday morning by McLean Bros. Publishers Limited Andrew Y. McLean, Publisher Evelyn Kennedy, Editor 1872 Brussels Post BRUSSELS Behind the scenes By Bill Smiley Box 5Q, Brussels, Ontario NOG 1H0 ei. Garage sales are quite the fad these days. Many people make them part of their lives. They troop around town watching for hand-made signs and check the ads in the classified section. Drive around any small town and you'll see a cluster of cars, in front of a house. "Must be a wedding or a funeral." you muse. Then you see a pile of junk with a horde of human magpies darting around it, snatching up bits, beating each other to another heap of rubble, like seagulls diving and screeching for a slice of french-fried spud. It's no wedding. There are no vows exchanged, except that you takes what you gets, "for better or for worse.", It's no funeral, except for those who pay six bucks for something that cost three 10 years ago. It's a garage sale. This phenomenon resembles a mini-auct- ion-sale minus the auctioneer. The garage sale allows the proprietor (often abetted to some of his neighbours) to get rid of all the useless items overflowing the garage, the tool-shed, the basement and the attic. It sometimes brings in two or three hundred dollars to the vendors, and the garage-sale groupies go home all excited because they have bought a three-legged chair, a horse-drawn sleigh, an umbrella with only one spoke missing, or six paperback novels for a dollar. One of my contemporaries, an habituee of these bizarre events, was more than a bit thunderstruck when he found at one sale that he could buy text-books from our school, duly stamped as such, dirt cheap. He remonstrat- ed with the owners, pointing out that the books belonged to the school and had been stolen by their children, but they'd have none of it. They wanted cash. So much for human nature. These were taxpap ers who had helped buy the books their kids had stolen, and now wanted to sell them back to the system so that other kids could steal the books they were still paying taxes for. May I disagree for a moment?i Kids do steal books. Regularly. They don't considerate it "stealing," It's just taking something from a big institution. That's not stealing, according to' about 50 per cent of them. It's just like dad not declaring something on his income tax or mom ordering a dress from Eaton's, wearing it to a party, then taking it back to the mail order office and returning it, claiming it was "too small" or had smudge marks in the armpits (after she'd discoed in it for four hours). They wouldn't steal from a friend. They might steal from their parents. But they have no compunction about "ripping off" a department store or the government. This is fact, not fancy, as I've learned iii discussions about morals. Back to the garage sales. There is no suggestion of stealing here. Both parties, buyer and seller, are perfectly aware of what's going on. The seller is trying to get rid of something he doesn't need. The buyer is buying something he doesn't need. It's a classic example of our materialistic age. We want to get rid of some of the garbage we've bought, and the buyer wants to buy some more garbage. The epitome of a garage-sale-groupie would be a person who goes to four garage sales, buys a lot of junk, then has a garage sale to dispose of it, perferably with a small mark-up. But they're fun. A friend of mine, who'll make a bid on anything, even though he doesn't know what it's for, has bought two old-fashioned horse-drawn sleighs. He has worked on them until they are serviceable. All he needs not is a couple of beasts to haul the things. He'll probably wind up with a camel and Shetland pony (and will make a fortune hauling people around when we run out of gas). Well, I wish I'd had a garage sale this past summer. First, I'd have sold the garage, a venerable institUtion. None of this electronic eye, or press a button and the door opens. It has a vast door, weighing about eight hundred pounds, You hoist the door and it slides on pulleys and cables, and at the tight by Keith Roulston One of the detriments of rural living, we are constantly reminded by those who think deprivation is having to live somewhere without 24-hour pizza delivery, is not only the lack of interesting job opportunities, the lack of cultural and entertainment opportun- ities and seven-story department stores but the fact that all the people you meet in small towns are the same. (The implication is also that we're boring.) In the small towns we don't get a chance to bump into university professors, televis- ion stars, fashion models or athletic stars at the local. MacDonald's or at somebody's Saturday evening cocktail party, and we're supposed to be much the worse for it. Now aside from the fact that in my various careers in these parts I've had the opportunity to meet all the academics and celebrities I could wish too, I think the argument about small town limiting your circle of acquaintances is a lot of baloney. For the majority of people it's the other way around: in the city you tend to meet only people who are much like you. You may have the opportunity to meet all kinds of people of varying professions, e thnic backgrounds and outlooks on life but the chances are you meet only people much like yourself when you live in the city. Most people in the city tend to live in a tight little circle despite the fact they are traveling around in a city with millions of people quite different than themselves. It's a survival mechanism. The city is so large and so impersonal so people tend to congregate in small groups of individuals they have something in common with. You work with one kind of person and you travel home from work as quickly as possible to live in a community, whether it be suburb, fancy apartment or chique condominium, who are much like yourself. White collar workers moment, on a good day it stops rising just at the height to tear off your radio aerial. The balances filled with sand, aren't quite enough from crashing down on your hood, but I've added an axe-head, to the other, a quart of paint. Perfect balance. A real buy. Behind the garage is a sort of tool shed. I say "sort of ', because when I've sailed into the garage on a slippery mid-winter day, I've sometimes gone an extra foot and crashed into the tool shed, which now leans about 35 degrees to the north. I'll throw in the tool shed with the garage, but not its contents. Migawd, the stuff in there would bug the eyes of either an antique dealer or a garage-groupie. We have garden tools in there that haven't been used since Sir John A. MacDonald's wife told him to get his nose of that glass and go out and stir up the garden. "" We have at least four perfectly good tir es for a 1947 Dodge. We have enough holy tarpaulin (Or is it holey? I've never known) to build a theatre Under the stirs. There's a perfectly good set of golf clubs, a wee bit rusty. There's a three-legged garden tool that must have come over with Samuel de Champain. There's a three-wheeled lawn- mower (mechanic's special). Six hundred feet of garden hose that a little adhesive would fix. And many more, too miscellaneous to mention. And that's only the tool shed. Inside the house, we have eight tons of books, left by our children. The attic is going to come right through to the kitchen, one of these days. How about a copy of Bliagavadgita, 1,000 pages, at $1.00? Man, I wish I'd got this idea off the ground about two months ago? Anyone interested In an iron crib, sides go up and down, filled with three hundred dollars worth of broken toys, exotic paintings, some records and a bag of marbles? Who needs to retire, with all this wealth lying around? associate with White collar workers, factory workers with factory workers. unemployed with other unemployed. There is a danger in all of this that few people who praise city life seem to notice. The danger was illustrated in a book I happened to be reading lately: Serpico, the story of the New York cop who blew the lid on corruption in the police department and got himself well hated by his fellow officers because of it. Serpico shouldn't have been exceptional. He should have been what every cop should have been: an honest guy setting out to serve the people who paid his salary. The fact that Serpico became a man so unique that he became the centre of a scandal, subject of a best selling book that was later turned into a hit movie and a television series, shows how easy it is sometimes to get our priorities all messed up. Serpico, you see, wasn't the only honest cop in New York. With 32,000 cops around you had to have more than a few that were honest. Serpico was, however, the only one who wasn't willing to turn a blind eye to the corruption of his fellow officers. When he saw a fellow cop taking a bribe it made him mad because it cheapened the work he itad set out to do in his life. When he saw cops organize payoff to the point they held monthly meetings on how to split the proceeds or how to put the pressure on some racketeer who wasn't keeping up with his weekly protection payments he decided he couldn't be like the others and turn a blind eye. Serpico felt that what made him different from other cops was that when he was off duty he didn't hang around other cops. Most cops went to the same bar, lived in the same neighbourhoods, entertained with each other, in general moved in a tight little world that included only other cops. They developed a fortress mentality, reinforcing each. other's distrust of the public, the people they were to serve. They eventually talked themselves into a belief that nobody cared about them so they had to look out for themselves and if that meant taking a little bribe money, well who was it going to hurt. To a less extent many professions are the same. Doctors tend to associate with doctors, journalists with journalists, teach- ers with teachers and so on. It can be stimulating but it can also be such a close little world that people forget that their job is to serve real people, not to impress each other, that they are part of a real world, not isolated from it. By contrast, I think, people in small towns have few of those luxuries. Few of us, with the possible exception of farmers, have enough people in our own field that we can isolate ourselves. Everyday we must assoc- iate with people from all different back- grounds. We are richer, and safer, for it. To the editor: Farmers need drastic action In the Sept 9th 1981 issue of the Post on page 9 in the last paragraph of "H.F.A. directors repeat" it states that - "Forty per cent of the population is directly or indirectly employed by the Agricultural industry". This statement is true enough but we should realize that only the farmers who represent only 5 per cent are having the real trouble. The 35 per cent of the population who are indirectly in Agriculture - the processors and employees, the transporters, the wholesalers and retailers are not apparently too dissatis- fied with their income and are just as interested in low food costs as the other 60 per cent of the population. The 5 per cent who are actually producing the food must take more drastic action than sending letters to Mr. Trudeau if they are going to improve their position. J. Carl HemingWay Established 1872 519-887-6641 Serving Brussels and the surrounding community Member Canadian Community Newspaper Association, Ontario Weekly Newspaper; Association and The Audit Bureau of Circulation. Authorized as second class mail by Canada. Post Office. Registration Number 0562. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1981 Brussels can do it! Brussels has been the centre for many activities all year round. So far this year, it has played host to Morris Township's 125th birthday celebrations, the Brussels Legion's 50th anniversary and the Huron County Plowing Match with more to come, with the Brussels Legion hosting the First World War veterans, the annual convention of the Guelph Area Women's Institute and a dance during Thanksgiving weekend for Grey Township's 125th birthday. The fact that a village the size of Brussels can manage to hold all these events in one year is a. tribute to the people who organize and work together to make them come off successfully. It also proves that the Brussels, Morris and Grey Community Centre has a definite purpose in serving the people of this community and that the time and effort spent building it was well worth it. With more events still to be held in Brussels this year, it's a sure bet that the village will carry it off with as much panache as it has shown so far. The garage sale craze Sugar and spice Small town luxury