If you've ever been to a garage sale, you've seen tables filled with unwanted gifts; battery-operated thingies still in their original wrappers, scented candles in jars with lids  stored in garages for so long that the wax is gooey, blank journals still blank.

If you've ever had a garage sale of your own, you know that there's always a twinge of bad feeling, letting go of something someone bought for you once upon a time, a thing that doesn't go with your decor or doesn't fit.

And yet, someone usually chooses it.  I have chosen such things from tables in neighbors' yards, and taken them home as treasures.  It's a good way to recycle, after all, selling what we no longer want or need for pennies on the original dollar.

There's a certain poetry to garage sales:  tables  with odd objects and books, unused workout tapes and machines,  baby clothes, toys, crutches and silverware.  Looking through someone else's stuff tells a  story of the life of the sellers. When I walk through yards and garages, and even more so in estate sales after the dweller has died, I feel like I'm peeping into the most personal spaces of a life.  It feels somehow too private, yet I can't help myself.

I read the words written in crumbling high school yearbooks and look at the smiling faces on the pages, knowing  that few of those athletes and scholars and musicians are even alive anymore.  I see the yarn never knitted, the antique Christmas wrapping paper and ornaments, the postcards from Disneyland, the dusty toppers on long-gone wedding cakes, and my mind weaves stories.

Antique dealers are usually the first to arrive, having an eye for potential re-sale value of things.  Then the neighbors come, then the bargain-hunters who wait for the late afternoon mark-downs.  By the end of the day, the festive tables of stuff are emptied, and their contents now in the homes of other people.  If anything remains, it goes to the curb.

The three-gifts-from-home activity we did in salon on Wednesday night (that I wrote about earlier) made me think a great deal about the meaning of gifts.  Take any one thing, however disliked, and wrap it up and put a bow on it, and it has a whole different meaning than it may have had in its first or second or third incarnation.  Pass it around and everyone looks at it in a new light--because now it's not just a thing, it's a present, one-of-a-kind.

While it may have once been just one more of a whole rack of similar models, lost in the crowd of merchandise, now it's all alone, unique, and worthy of a second look.  Often, it's dated.  Sometimes, it's faded.  Parts of it may be missing.  But it now has its fifteen seconds of fame, shining in a new way, a thing with potential.  At the very least, it's a memory jogger.

Think: fondue pot.
In the sixties they were all the rage.  You had to have a fondue pot with all those skinny little forks of different colors.  And yet--I can recall only one time when a hostess actually used the fondue pot for a party and we all sat around dipping chunks of bread in a strong-flavored cheese warm in the blue pot. How many times have I reached for a fondue pot at a garage sale or thrift shop, thinking: maybe I'd actually do it, then remember how messy and slow it is to fondue?  "It's fun to fondue with you" was the phrase that sold all those now-discarded pots, some still in their original boxes.

At salon, someone opened a gift that was an odd-shaped wooden bowl--not exactly ugly, but not the kind of bowl most of us would choose to buy today.  It looked like a 1970s  wedding present.  I loved what she said when she opened it: "This bowl is not me now, but it's the me I was about fifteen years ago."

I was tempted once to buy a set of the dishes I had once upon a time had.  They were on the gift registry of my wedding: a set called Vineyard, with yellow and blue and green grapes around the border of every plate and cup and sugar bowl.  These plates are not at all my taste any more, but once upon a time they were.  I decided against them.  I decided that I could live happily ever afterward without them.  Once upon a time is too long ago to try to revive.