cruel disappointments

OK, I've had some disappointments in my life.  I'm not complaining; that's just how it is.  Losing my gig at Hamline may have been one of the worst of those.  That was when a crowd of hapless administrators swapped me out for a crowd of comparably hapless Nebraska turd farmers posing as booksellers.  It's a good thing that I've left that bitterness behind.  In retrospect, none of those disappointment events, as dark as their days may have been, killed me and I'm left pretty happy with life as it plays itself out.

I remind Miz Susan over and over again that, yes, our lives suck to a certain degree but that we've got it easy compared to way too many people.  Those wise reminders don't hold us for long, of course, and we fall back into pissing and moaning mode.  Oh well, p+m'g is one of our few rights and it beats the hell out of kicking the cats or trying to smuggle stink-bombs into work to stuff up into the ventilation ducts.

My latest disappointment has to do with, of all things, the Goodwill.  That's right, the Goodwill.  That which has brought so much fun and meaning into my monotone (but not unhappy) existence.  It might all work out for the best but I have to wait for the late returns on that one.

The Goodwill disenchantment came at me like a two-pronged attack and started maybe a month or a month and a half ago.  I'd been noticing that my home Goodwill store on Charles off of Fairview and University wasn't providing me the wow-factor finds that I'd gotten used to over the last couple of years.  It used to be a given, much to Miz Susan's displeasure, that I could practically count on a grab bag full of keen stuff as a result of my weekly (OK, maybe biweekly) visit(s).  Not that I actually needed any of it.  What on God's green earth made me buy those two MacGregor baseball gloves?  I'm as likely to ever play softball again as I am to play centerfield for the Twins.  Or even rightfield.  And all the shirts and jackets and sweaters and pants which I already had in more than abundance in several closets and dressers at home?  Plates, bowls, cups, nickel beer glasses, coffee mugs.  Like I wasn't able to have a cup of coffee without the Cleveland Indians or Pioneer Press mug I found?  I was doing my best to spread the stuff around to friends and family but that wasn't doing much to clear the clutter.  Not to mention the strange looks I got when I gave people stuff which still had the 99¢ Goodwill price tags stuck to them.

But it was the thrill of the chase and the occasional pot of gold at the end of the Goodwill rainbow that kept me coming back for more.  And more and more.  I guess that dragging all of that junk into the house motivated me to clear some space in the closets and dressers and cupboards and to box and bag up all the displaced stuff to haul off to the Goodwill donation dock.  But that was, at best, a zero-sum game even with minimal disposal of stuff scoring me a few points with Miz Susan.  At least I think that I've never bought anything after I'd donated it.  I've bought a few things which were pretty close matches to what I'd just gotten rid of but nothing that's come home was making a round trip.  I'm pretty sure.

But the Charles Avenue store was definitely getting depressingly more bare and barren by the visit and it sure as hell wasn't because I was buying anything.  There  just wasn't anything appealing enough to buy.

Just as I was starting to despair that I'd outgrown the Goodwill and that I'd have to take on some new hipster affectation, like maybe heroin addiction, a possible solution presented itself.  It looked like the Goodwill was coming to me and opening a new store in Brooklyn Park!!  I was excited, to put it mildly.

I'd been passing by a building site in BPark twice a day for the past several months on my daily drives to and from work.  It was a monstrous cinder block building, maybe three stories tall by three football fields long.  I'd casually wondered who in their right mind was choosing to invest in a  warehouse building in the northern suburbs when it came clear.  Signage got tacked onto the outside of the building in the form of the familiar white lettering on a dark blue field.  Goodwill was coming to town and right on my way home.  I was in heaven as this was all revealed to me.

The reason that my home Goodwill was looking so desolate must have been because the GW merchandising geniuses were pulling stock from it, and probably all of the 42 other metro area stores, to fill the racks and shelves of the Brooklyn Park store with wow factor.  I had visions of stopping at the new store every day on the way home.  Miz Susan would never notice and my only problem would be how to smuggle the new booty into the house so that she wouldn't notice it piling up.  Life was good.

In a fever, I called the Goodwill home office where the merchandising geniuses were housed.  This happened to be in the complex of retail and office space at the Charles Avenue location.  My breathless email (is that possible?) asked when the new store would open and the response told me that it was going to be on the coming Saturday.  Well, I wasn't going to make a 40-mile round-trip on the weekend even if it was for a new Goodwill store.  I might be crazy but I'm not totally stupid.  I could wait until the following week.

I played a little passive/aggressive on Miz Susan on Monday afternoon.  I called her from the car as I was exiting the NoHenn parking lot and told her that I was going to try to hold off on stopping at the new Goodwill until later in the week.  I heard her long sigh (and if I'd had a picture phone I'd have seen her rolling her eyes) and she told me to go ahead and stop.  I might have heard her whisper through gritted teeth that she didn't really care if I ever came home but maybe that was just the hum of the tires and the wind whistling past the Camry.

But, oh boy, had I been played.  I wish that I had a copy of the store's security camera footage as I walked through the door and looked around.  My jaw must have dropped a good 8 inches.  I'd stumbled into a Goodwill Outlet store.  The place was fixtured with a bunch of low-lying...somethings...which could have been feed troughs for cattle or horses.  Someone has told me since that that's exactly what they are.  There was junk poured onto these troughs in no discernible order with no apparent discernible pricing system.  Far from skimming the cream of their other 42 metro area stores' inventories, the Goodwill merchandising geniuses seemed to have chosen to stock this store with whatever they'd been able to fish out of trash cans as they cruised up and down the alleys of the metro area.  I left as quickly as possible so that I could get home and take a shower.  I felt dirty and betrayed.  I think that I broke into tears as I walked in the door and blubbered out my story to Miz Susan.  She sent me straight to bed.  I think she slept in one of the spare bedrooms that night.  Or maybe on the couch.

The one-two punch of two crummy Goodwill stores was like a couple of body blows.  I stayed away from any and all Goodwill stores for better than a week.  I snuck in a trip to the St. Vincent de Paul store down on 7th Street.  I should have known better; no wow factor there either.

This past Wednesday, I stopped in at the Charles Avenue store.  And was greeted with signs announcing a clearance sale at 50% off everything in the store.  None of that everything was worth buying even at 50% off but the real news, the heart-gladdening news, the news that's fired up my will and desire to go thrift shopping again was in the lower half of the signs.  The Goodwill was going to close down their Charles Avenue Store to pave the way for a brand new, two-storied, Taj Mahal and Mecca of a Goodwill store at 1239 University Avenue.  Which would be doing a Grand Opening on Saturday the 28th, now less than a week away.  Talk about being pulled from the very depths of desolate depression to the heights of glorious new thrift shop possibilities.  I think that Miz Susan was happy for me when I blurted out the great news after I got home on Wednesday.

It turns out that what was news to me was ho-hum for others.  Big surprise there.  When I saw Sue's sister Jill at the gala opening of this year's version of the Monroe 4th Grade Opera (named Electric Catastrophe: Save the Energy; there's probably YouTube video out there), her first question for me was, "Are you ready for the Grand Opening of the new Goodwill store?"  She'd known for weeks.  Or maybe just days.  But ages longer than I'd known.  She suggested that we get a big group together to make the scene.  Which would be fine by me.  I doubt that we'll be able to strong-arm Miz Susan into that excursion.  She puts up with my thrift shop shenanigans, if barely, but I don't think that she's ready to surrender to the idea that her life is as silly as mine.  She's undoubtedly right.  I'm doing my best to drag her down but she's remaining above it all.  Class will win out, in the end.  She's got it.  Me?  Not quite so much.