Late Life Downsizing: Goodbye to All That

Fender Precision bass, a made in Japan beauty, now owned by an actual bassist with an actual band. Best of luck and thanks for the $1,100.
Donated despite its beauty, furniture is a hard sell. Just glad I’ll never need to move it again.

I’ve been separated from a long marriage for some years now, living in a nearby dilapidated, cheap, rental tract house, owned by my old college buddy.

I’m maintaining the house while painting the inside and I found a good part of my valuable or treasured things I seldom or never used, and were right where I wanted to paint. You think to yourself, ‘why am I moving this thing from room to room when I don’t use it?’

Donated via CL, the new owner said she was going to store her bibles in it.
Sorry, sis, a great gift but too complex for the caveman brain. $65, trade for 420. No sale yet.

It lead me to evaluate everything and think, ‘Did I use this within the last few years?’ And, ‘Will I realistically ever use this?’ If no, then I either sold it on Craigslist or donated it if the monetary value was too low to hassle with Craigslist.

The Restore store in Roseville, CA, Jimmy Carter’s Habitat for Humanity, accepted daddy’s 1977 kit clock as a donation, a beautiful old thing but always in the way, heavy, awkward and dusty as you see here. Basically not sellable for those reasons. The chimes and escapement clacks were hell on my wartime tinnitus so I never ran it.

I inherited things from my father in 2022, some of which I wanted, some of which I took because nobody else wanted them and I had an empty decrepit house to store them in.

I got $220 for the Innova Swing, and lucky to get it. Fine kayak but contraindicated for eldsters with a chrome steel plastic fake hip, arthritis and hammer-toe.

The previous deadbeat house tenants abandoned things here when they scarpered: and my landlord is a hoarder too, so I had tons of things on hand to sell.

Original oil painting donated to Sutter Hospital Hospice Thrift store off Douglas Blvd. I liked it but no holes in my walls please, after all that fucking spackling.

I also had to lose the homeowners’ mind set of ‘I might need this one day’. Or, ‘that would look nice in this room’. I’m a renter, after I paint the walls I’m hanging no pictures or decor on them, no matter how much it would bring the room together.

And sometimes I forget my family has grown up and moved out and that I’m unlikely to have grandchildren and I buy absurdly big toys. My new motto: ‘Never buy anything you can’t pick up and carry by yourself’. Broke even on the Old Town Wahoo sailing canoe, and my back moving it.

I converted this late 1970s mixte frame Peugeot to single speed but could not flog it on Craigslist to save my life. I gave up and hung it upside down in my garage to admire until a few more years shrink me down enough it fit it. It’s French you know.

Craigslist has been good to me in the last few downsizing months, bringing me at least a fraction of what I paid for many items; and pure profit from inherited items, aside from writing, photographing, posting, updating, and actually selling it to someone.

And money is nice, partly compensating my aching old back from toting heavy shit up and down my killer, not-up-to-specs stairs, front and back.

I’ve found I can only play one bass at a time.

Dealing with Craigslist buyers, a hive of tire-kickers, low-ballers and no-shows, can be an irritant. But a small percentage will open that creaky wallet if the thing looks good, and the price is right. It only takes one. And all sales are final on Craigslist.

The lovely and sweet-toned Godin Freeway 4 bass guitar, my main squeeze for years. Sold for $200, a good deal for both of us.

It took me years of collecting to assemble my mineral, rock, and fossil collection but I packed it up when I moved here, and collections are meant to be shared. Or else it is merely hoarding.

A nice Iranian man bought all 40-something pieces for $175, no haggling either, probably fighting stereotypes. I’m glad I didn’t piece it out and it all went to another rock lover.

Small dark trilobites were were personally lifted from the Grand Canyon gift shop by me when I worked there in the early 1980s. Take that, Fred Harvey, exploit me, would you?!

A $50 mini bass I sold for $60. Winning! I’m retiring to Brazil.

Here’s one thing that refuses to sell, my father’s fine Hitachi router. It’s one of the last things I’m selling because the place is largely emptied out, so few drop cloths will be needed for paint spatter. I could learn routing I suppose. But because I really value my fingers I think I will not.

I’ll never sell my $64 Univox Hi-Flyer short-scale piccolo bass conversion, I need it every day to play the blues.

But more than that, it’s a psychological leave taking of my former self, a necessary jettisoning of my past life, now as dead and buried as Pompeii or Doggerland.

I kept the good stuff I still need and use and love: and just a mantle’s worth of mementos to remind me of the good times, which I did have. Despite it all.

Unless noted, all text and images by todgermanica.com.

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