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Insecurity
It was an ordinary garage sale, really. We'd had the goods stored for over five months since our move to this smaller house, half the size of our former palace. Okay, I take it back. The sale was far from ordinary. We had 18 years worth of stuff: large furniture, antiques, boxes and boxes of collectible books, glassware, curios, and original artwork. We had the coolest stuff in the Four Corners, and not one stitch of clothing. Maybe I should rephrase that: We had no clothing for sale Â? we did actually wear clothing.
I have no explanation for what happened next. Well, maybe I do, but I'll let you draw your own conclusions. Maybe it's related to the purest form of coincidence, or maybe it's a consequence of empowering an army of citizens with the illusion of authority. All I can say for sure is that since 9-11, paranoia is a national condition. The only cure I can think of is laughter.
While the TSA shopper checked out our goods, a woman asked me about a rocking chair for sale, if I'd take $20 instead of $25. I said sure. She paid me but couldn't fit the chair in her car. Could I hold it until she could get a friend with a truck to pick it up later in the afternoon? Sure, sure, I said. I marked it as sold and moved it to where I was sitting, right beside the cash box. The TSA lady must have been in the barn with all the other shoppers, picking up objects and putting them back down. She also could have been listening.
Alright, I know she was listening, because she was my next customer, so she must have stood nearby. She asked if the television worked. I told her it worked perfectly. I even carried it to her car and loaded it into her backseat to prove that I could work perfectly. When she drove away I thought I was done with homeland security.
But later in the afternoon another homeland security lady climbed out of a truck. We'd been busy all morning, merchandise literally flying out the door, but I felt certain TSA had no jurisdiction over a garage sale.
"I'm here to pay for and pick up the rocking chair" she told me.
"You can pick it up, but your friend already paid for the chair."
The new TSA lady tried her cell phone several times, frustrated she couldn't get through to her friend. She asked me to believe she was honest and if the chair hadn't been paid for, she's come back with the money. She was uniformed. I mean, we trust the security of our airports to these people, don't we?
After she left, I forgot all about the rocking chair until another woman pulled in with a truck. She was not a TSA employee. She said she'd come to pick up her chair. Her words would have knocked me right off my rocker, but I didn't have it anymore.
You see, I'd been duped at my own garage sale by homeland security. I apologized to the woman who originally bought the chair for my blunder and returned her money. She behaved graciously, which was more than I deserved for my foolishness.
Eventually I managed to get my $20 back from my airport security tag team, but it really wasn't the $20 that mattered. I wanted to see just one more TSA employee. I wanted one more uniformed officer to pull into my driveway. I'd demand she show her ID, open her trunk, empty her pockets, remove her shoes, unbuckle her belt, and pretend she appreciated all these intrusions before she could begin to shop.
I'd call it garage sale security, to protect all my neighbors from homeland terrorists.
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