What’s mine is yours

One of the many enjoyable aspects of living in NYC is the fact that you can dispose of any unwanted item, large or small, by simply placing it on the sidewalk in front of your apartment building, and it will rarely go to waste. Usually, the sidewalk is where the garbage goes to get picked up by sanitation, but the sidewalk is also a fantastic place to donate perfectly decent but nevertheless unwanted goods to any lucky person that happens to walk by. Anything from furniture to electronics ends up on the sidewalk, and more often than not, these items get snatched up by someone else. It's like a very efficient recycling program. For example, a few years ago my husband Ethan dragged home an old elementary school desk, which was left on the sidewalk. It has since served as our coffee table. An excellent find.

We too have offered up many items to the sidewalk shoppers. Mostly, these items included bulky furniture which we were unable to drag up the steps of our walk-up apartment when we moved to LIC. The speed at which these pieces disappeared was incredible - especially so for this huge bed frame that Ethan had once constructed out of two-by-fours and plywood. We left it to die on the sidewalk, and within a couple of hours, it had magically disappeared. This sort of thing never would have happened in the suburbs of Ohio.

There is a downside to all of this wildly free, anonymous commerce. Bedbugs. From what i understand, bedbugs are a bit of a problem in larger cities where people live in such close proximity to one another and are willing to take other people's potentially infested furniture off the sidewalk and bring it into their own, as yet uninfested apartments. Thoughtful people try to follow a protocol in these situations. I have often walked past furniture on the sidewalk that bore large signs warning potential takers that the furniture contained bedbugs. Usually, however, people offer very little information on the background of their donated items. Simple guidelines do exist that can help one determine how risky a sidewalk treasure may be. The obvious red flag is if the object of interest is lying in or adjacent to bags of actual garbage. If this is the case, it is fair to assume that the one who dumped the item there knows that there is something very undesirable about the item in question, and it is best to give the abandoner of that item the benefit of the doubt. Conversely, if the item is deliberately placed at a considerable distance from a pile of garbage, it is the donater's way of saying "this is a decent item and is, to the best of my knowledge, devoid of anything particularly foul." Still, it's taker beware.

My most recent donation to the land of free-sidewalk-goods was a perfect candidate for streetside abandonment. It was a wedding gift. It was something that, due to my Catholic upbringing (and guilt), i could not bring myself to actually throw away, even though i am not religious and i find items such as this to be completely...well, undesirable. What was this item? Well, it was...it was...why is it so hard to write this?.....it was .... a crucifix attached to a plaque with images of, um, our lord & savior and his uh, mom. And they were those images where they look sad. Oh god.

So i didn't want this thing. Assuming there is a hell, i know i'm going to it, but man, this thing was horrible to behold. i had to get rid of it. But i just couldn't throw it away. So what did i do? i put it in a box, wrote "free jesus" on the lid, and put it on the sidewalk propped up against a tree.

And a few hours later, it was gone.