Anchorage Daily News

Memo to the guy from Eagle River so enamored by the framed photo of Marilyn Monroe that he spent his last penny Saturday at my big fat garage sale:

You forgot to take the golf club you bought for your girlfriend in the hope it would get you out of the doghouse.

You must have been kicking yourself when you returned home to your girl with nothing but a picture of the most fabulous babe in the history of fabulous babes.

Then again, a smart man doesn't equip a girlfriend with a pitching wedge when he's drooling over another woman.

The things you see at garage sales. And here I was thinking they're just about clearing out closet space and pocketing a little extra cash.

Instead I got an education in haggling (lesson learned: I'm an utter failure at it) and a month's worth of people-watching squeezed into eight hours.

My favorite was the man who remained behind the steering wheel of his pickup while issuing orders to his wife as she perused the merchandise. After he directed her to an item or two that he wanted, she found something she wanted, apparently for their child -- a cereal bowl with a Winnie-the-Pooh character on it.

"Look!" she said. "Tigger!"

The man sighed. "If you buy one more Pooh thing, he's getting a BB gun at 3."

Alas, this was a gun-free garage sale. It was, for that matter, a fairly testosterone-free garage sale. No fishing gear, no tools, no weapons of any kind at all, other than the pitching wedge.

A small selection of sporting goods were for sale, including a Johnny Bench model catcher's mitt, sized for perhaps an 8-year-old -- a steal at 50 cents, especially considering Bench was my childhood hero.

One man showed up looking for sandpaper -- all I had was shelving paper -- and stayed long enough to try on a pair of black bike gloves. He tried tugging them on, but they were too small. "They're O.J. gloves," I told him. "That's why I put them next to the cutlery."

The gloves are two bucks, but the jokes are free, folks.

Around noon a woman who'd spent the morning at other garage sales showed up, bursting with excitement over her bounty. Her husband collects autographs, she said, and she found a military commendation that had been signed by Lyndon Johnson. "This is my treasure of the day," she said, showing off the framed certificate.

And here I was selling wee-wee pads left over from my geriatric cat's final days.

The biggest treasure at my garage sale, as it turned out, wasn't for sale and didn't belong to me. But it brought by far the day's best return.

The night before, while organizing things in my driveway, a man walked by with a dog. The dog had been running loose and the man was taking it from neighborhood to neighborhood, looking for the owner.

It was late, and the man said he didn't know what to do with the dog overnight; his apartment is small and he already has a dog. We said we'd keep it and put up "Found Dog" signs the next day, which we did.

It was late afternoon on Saturday when the dog's owner called. He and a buddy were just getting back from fishing on the Kenai, a trip cut short when his wife called to say the dog was missing. They were almost back in town when the wife called again to say she'd seen our sign and gave them directions to my big fat garage sale/animal rescue center.

The owner arrived and a frenzied reunion took place, during which the dog broke a wine glass. I joked that he owed me a quarter for the broken glass.

I got better than that. The owner took the ecstatic dog to his truck and returned with a Ziploc bag full of salmon fillets. It was the most satisfying exchange of the day. He got his dog. I got his fish. And I still have a $3 pitching wedge if anyone out there needs a way out of the doghouse.

Beth Bragg's opinion column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Her e-mail address is bbragg@adn.com.