COLUMN:It’s Just Business Now
I’m sorry, but this relationship is over. It was nice for a while. You accepted everything I brought you – good, bad and indifferent. I felt needed. I felt special. I felt like I was making a difference in somebody’s life. Now, I guess it is all just business. I know it is partially my fault. I was gone for six months and really didn’t keep in touch, but how was I to know so much had changed? The last time we met, you picked over me like the last 10 minutes of a Saturday garage sale: “I’ll take this but not that, I only have room for so much stuff in my life now.” Well, sorry, but I won’t part myself out. You have to take the junk with the treasures. I’m moving on. Yes, my favorite thrift store no longer loves me unconditionally, and it hurts. How low do you have to sink that the charity thrift store won’t take your stuff? It’s not as if I drove up with a box of kittens, potato peels and brown bananas. I offered a comfortable chair considered fashionable a few years ago and the usual box of least-loved clothes. True, if nobody buys this stuff for 50 cents, they are going to have to send it to the landfill, but that is the price you pay for taking the two vintage Herman Miller chairs. I mean, I know I have never been a fashionable person, but my clothes should still be worth 50 cents on the middle-aged-guy rack, shouldn’t they? I realize you don’t know me and my record of responsible giving, but that is the problem in a nutshell. It’s just business. So I am now dating outside my religion. Though it represents a church of which I am not a member, my new flirtation is Deseret Industries. You drive up, they smile, they take your stuff and ask you if you want a receipt. The people who work there actually seem to enjoy it so much that they wear the clothes sold there. I know some of it will end up in the landfill or shipped off in containers bound for Somalia, but it feels friendly. I leave with a smile, wondering who might be waking up to the tones of my old clock radio or skateboarding with my old MP3 player plugged into their ears. And truth be known, one of the main reasons I give stuff to the DI is that it makes room for stuff I want to buy from the DI. It is sort of like the fourth law of thermodynamics of stuff – it is neither created nor destroyed, it only moves from one place to another.
Dennis Hinkamp would like to thank all those who bought his cast offs and in return thanks you for all your detritus he has accumulated.