Winging it with the early birds

By Felix Carroll

Memory is a tricky thing, but I seem to recall they came in a cloud of morning breath, and they were waving hayforks and flails, ready to sake and pummel. At a standstill, they revved their engines then let them die down to an eerie, ominous, feral-like purr.

Then, one of them — maybe their chief — a big, tall stranger, stepped out, walked up to my house and peered through our side door window. It was 7 a.m. He looked like the spooky Robert Mitchum character in the original “Cape Fear,” with a long-distance, hard-miles-logged trench coat, his face scarred deeply with perpetual insolence, his brow crossed like a shotgun scope.

It was precisely at that point when we realized that being yard-sale virgins would carry a price.

“This where the yard sale is?” he asked, his words prying like a crowbar through the now partially opened door.

“You’re two hours early,” I said.

“Your ad didn’t say ‘no early birds,’” he chastised, and not in a fun-loving way.

Until that moment, I had never heard of these bargain-starved denizens of daybreak known as early birds.

I asked the man to kindly get off our property and come back at 9 a.m.

He asked me unkindly what we were selling. I told him unkindly, “Lots of stuff.”

“Well, can I see it?” he asked.

See what? No items were out yet. Many things weren’t priced. I still had a toothbrush in my mouth. There was a Cheerio still stuck to my cheek. Finally, my wife came to the door.

“Get lost!” she said to the guy.

He walked away, peeved — though he did come back at 9 a.m. and bought a lamp. (It’s lamps they’re after, by the way. And end tables. I think they live in homes constructed from lamp materials, with roofs made from beveled end tables.)

It’s late summer. The robins are still singing. The ice cream trucks are still ding-a-linging. And the scattered detritus from the heaving sea of domesticity is being disgorged at a yard in a neighborhood near you.

When it comes to the timeless task of holding a yard sale — of unloading, at a price, the good, the fair, the in-need-of-repair, the impossibly artless fruit dish, crocheted golf club head covers, pots, pans, tools, books, toys, toilet seats, whatever — clearly there is a right way to go about it.

We understood most of the basics. You’re supposed to be organized a day or so before the yard sale, with sale items set aside and priced and signs posted at strategic street corners. You’re supposed to smile with Zen-like satisfaction because, after all, you are de-cluttering your house and people are giving you good money for things that mean absolutely nothing to you. You’re supposed to pretend you’re a window display artist and make everything look nice — the lawn cut, driveway swept, and sale items orderly displayed.

And now, I can say in retrospect, if you place a classified advertisement to help draw people, you’re supposed to include the words “no early birds” from the ad’s text. Omitting these words can be a blunder of biblical magnitude, like the Ten Commandments without the word “not.”

Otherwise what you’re doing is you’re literally telling early birds that your spare home key is under the doormat and to help themselves to the leftover pot roast.

Anyway, that’s where we went wrong at our first yard sale a year ago — a pre-moving, what-the-hell-is-this-thing, let’s-sell-it initiative that seemed innocent at first. That is, until early bird after early bird began roosting on our stoop and cawing like crows, impatient, pushy and just generally making us very nervous as we hastily and unceremoniously tried to get everything together.

As if trying to sell a broken ski pole weren’t embarrassing enough.

(By the way, I make a distinction between the early birds and the regular yard-sale shoppers who came later — most of whom couldn’t have been lovelier and some of whom still owe me money.)

But these early birds? It was as if they had some sort of Cinderella syndrome — that at 9 a.m. the carriage would transform back into a pumpkin, and the glass slipper into a stale hotdog bun.

I’ve always been a big fan of birds — pretty birds, songbirds, odd birds, Big Bird.

But I had never encountered such surly birds as early birds. I think I understand now perhaps where Alfred Hitchcock was coming from with that strange movie of his.