I’ve been trying to do some spring cleaning this week – which actually is more like pre-autumn cleaning, I’m so far behind – and I’ve come to realize I’m confused about what should be donated and what should be tossed out.
The truth is, the last time I donated anything was about 15 years ago, when we moved from our previous house to our current one. That’s because I haven’t parted with much of anything since then – mainly because I still haven’t unpacked a lot of it.
But looking back, even in those days the whole donation process was pretty complicated.
For example, after spending hours rounding up, boxing and hauling my collection of Writer’s Market books – issues 1984 to 2006, with each one about the thickness of a Manhattan phone book – along with approximately 400 romance novels, to the Salvation Army Thrift Store, I was told they weren’t accepting any books.
Goodwill, however, loved books…at least back then they did, before I brought them a truckload of mine. For all I know, thanks to me, they probably ended up having to search for additional funding so they could build a library.
Clothing donations were another thing I had to become educated about back then. I’d always thought that old clothes in any condition – buttons missing, tears, lint, broken zippers, spaghetti stains, etc. – were welcome because they could be repaired and de-stained to look as good as new.
Not so.
Both Goodwill and the Salvation Army wanted clothes that were either new or close to new in appearance. One employee explained to me, “If the clothes are something you wouldn’t want to be caught dead wearing in public, then chances are our shoppers won’t want to be caught alive wearing them.”
She had a point. That probably meant no shoppers would be whipping out their credit cards to buy my paint-splattered sweatpants with the hole in the seat. I also wondered about style. Would my double-breasted, pink paisley jacket from 1969, although still in excellent condition, be something “vintage” that shoppers would want to buy and wear…or just point at and laugh?
“Maybe someone might buy it…for a Halloween party,” I said to myself as I tossed the jacket into the “donate” bag. The same went for my bright yellow ruffled blouse and neon-orange stretch-pants with the stirrups for the feet. I figured someone, like maybe a crossing guard, might want to buy them and wear them…to avoid being run over by an oncoming truck.
Furniture also was tricky to donate. For some reason, most charities at that time treated sofa beds as if someone with the plague had slept on them. So if you showed up with a sofa bed, you went home with the sofa bed.
I’d assumed, however, that, unlike clothing, the actual condition of furniture wasn’t too important. I mean, I knew plenty of people who enjoyed buying old furniture and repairing it, stripping it down and then painting, staining or reupholstering it.
But just as I was about to bring my end tables with the assortment of dog-claw scratches and toothmarks on them to one of the charities, my neighbor told me he’d just tried to donate a peeling curio-cabinet and they’d rejected it. Upset because he’d wasted a good part of the morning lugging it over there, he’d snapped at them, “Well, what do you expect? If it still looked brand new, I wouldn’t be getting rid of it!”
To be honest, another reason why I stopped donating items years ago was because something terribly embarrassing happened – so embarrassing, the mere memory still causes my cheeks to turn red.
After we moved into our new house, I went back to our old homestead to clean out the big storage shed in the yard. I filled about three trash bags with stuff to be taken to the dump – old mildewed magazines and newspapers, expired canned goods, containers of dried-up latex paint, rags, rusty tools and much more.
But I also found some still-nice things in their original packages out there – like just about every new handyman-type gadget advertised on TV that my husband just HAD to have…and then never used.
Okay, so maybe the unused ThighMaster was mine.
Anyway, I put those items into a separate trash bag so I could donate them.
An hour later, I finally glanced at my watch and realized I was running late for an appointment, so I grabbed the bag of donation items and left. On the way to my appointment, I dropped off the bag at Goodwill.
The next day, when I returned to the old house to continue cleaning out the shed, I noticed there was some room left in one of the trash bags, so I still could add a few more things to it. When I opened it, however, I was bewildered to see it contained the good items, including the ThighMaster I thought I’d taken to Goodwill.
That’s when I realized I must have accidentally grabbed one of the bags of trash and donated that instead! Even worse, I knew the bag contained catalogs that had my name and address printed on them, so I wouldn't even be able to remain anonymous. With every passing minute I became more and more apprehensive about the police arriving to arrest me for illegal dumping.
When I later confessed to my husband what had happened and told him how embarrassed I felt, sympathetic soul that he was, he burst out laughing.
“Well, you know what they always say,” he said. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure! Who knows? Maybe someone can fold a few of those old newspapers into an origami mini-dress or something. And all of the holes the mice chewed in them might end up looking like lace.”
At that moment, I seriously wondered if one of the charities might accept HIM as a donation…if I put new clothes on him first.
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Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.
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