Our pool table resided in the basement, piled high with boxes of outgrown clothes and books to be donated.
I listed the pool table for sale. That way the boxes could go away.
A young man showed up with his buddy.
I had asked $35 for the pool table even though I paid $25 at a yard sale. It was a slate top pool table and connoisseurs liked that idea.
So this young man examined the slate and did a verbal fist pump. “Slate! I can sell this table anywhere for $200.”
I smiled. I just wanted it out of my basement and wouldn’t mind getting my $25 back.
“Would you take $30 for it?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Well, I need to come back with a pickup. Could you hold it for me?”
“If you pay today.”
He studied the table and his buddy. Perhaps the $200 loomed before him. “I wonder if we can get it home now.”
So they jumped into the project. I found all the pool balls, including two hiding under the workbench, which I carried to their dented and rusty old station wagon.
I wondered what the plan was but they didn’t have time for a plan. They bustled around like a hen with newly hatched chicks.
Then they grabbed an end of the table and began pushing. The air was blue and the guys sweating before they and the table emerged from the house.
Grunting and groaning like a mama pig in labor, they hoisted the pool table onto the top of car.
“We’re good now,” the new buyer assured me.
They tied the table onto the top of the car, running the ropes through the open windows, and then stood for a long moment with their hands on the handle. I’d like to think they were reformulating a new plan. If shimmying through the open windows counted as a new plan, they had one.
They had a plan for big bucks but, after watching their first steps, I think my $30 sale was safer than their $200 dream.
