Thumper Thinks Out Loud

I happened upon a garage sale this afternoon, which isn't unusual to find on a Sunday; this one, however, was being held in the Walmart parking lot, one neat little corner of asphalt covered with piles of clothing, books, toys, and odd assorted glassware. I presume that I missed all the good stuff, as the good stuff tends to vanish from the typical garage sale by noon, but it was still worth wandering around.

This wasn't your typical garage sale. Walmart donated the space, the tables upon which items for sale were displayed, a dining fly to provide shade for those manning the sale, and food for them to sell (gone by the time I got there, and I could have used a cold drink at this point.) Yep, the Evilness of Retail ponied up the goods that allowed a neighborhood full of people to host a sale of donated goods.

All those people stood in the hot sun--except for the lucky ones who only sweated under the dining fly--to raise money for 10 year old Ashley Sullivan, who is in a bed at Children's Hospital and Research Center in Oakland, where she's undergoing treatment for a rare type of brain tumor. She's facing surgery to place a shunt in her brain, 53 weeks of chemo, and only has a 70% chance of survival.

I picked through the toys and clothes, looking for books, and found a few I might pick up and read someday. As I paid for them I had the blip of a thought speed through my head that if I still lived near all the Evil People, I could pick through the toys as well, looking for the noisiest ones, to gift the children of the neighborhood with. Oh, there were lots of kids' books for sale, too, but there's a certain joy in giving loud toys to other people's children.

I need to make friends in this neighborhood. Surely someone has small children in need of noisy things.

And +1 to Walmart. Perhaps they're not as Evil as everyone makes them out to be...