Selling Out

“What if I swapped out the silver-rimmed tires for the black-rimmed ones?” The salesperson asked, looking hopeful.

“I’d buy it,” I said. “How long to switch them out? I need to be out of here in an hour.”

“I can’t do it in an hour. How about if I throw the four extras in the back of your new Jeep? You’ll get four new tires for free.”

And that’s how I ended up with a new Jeep and four extra tires that have been sitting in my carport ever since. They’re an albatross hanging around the neck of my garage. How do you go about selling four tires? Is Craigslist still a thing? And would anyone even want them?

Now they just sit in silence, wrapped in plastic, hoping for my Wrangler’s wheels to fail so that they can get on with their lives. “Why did he even bring us here?” they must be asking themselves. “We’re supposed to be rolling over trails, not sitting in this hellhole.”

Normally I’m great at selling things. I’ve done it my whole life. In my teens I scalped concert tickets. In my twenties I was a talent agent, selling bands to bar owners for weeklong gigs. I’ve sold everything, from research projects to corporate training.

But somehow four tires tripped me up.

Selling my business was almost easier. The hardest part about that was the existential crisis that came along for the ride.

It’s been three years now and I’m only just coming to terms with it. During the first year after the sale, when people asked, ‘What do you do?” I’d say, “I’m the founder of an educational enrichment company.” I’d say it in the present tense, even though it was in the past.

Then there was a year when I said, “I’m on a bunch of boards, built a nonprofit, you know, there’s a lot going on.” God forbid people should think I had free time.

Now I say, “I write.” If I’m feeling insecure, I’ll stupidly add, “and my Substack has more than 30,000 subscribers,” as if that matters to anyone but me.

There’s one more thing in my life that I can’t sell though, at least not yet.

Our family home.

The kids are grown, and Trish and I travel a lot for work and pleasure. We’re hardly there and it makes no sense to keep the place. Maintaining it is absurd, from lawn cutting to snow shoveling to plumbing to roofing. The place is over a hundred years old but insists that we make it look thirty-nine.

No. Keeping the house makes no sense at all.

We bought our suburban Chicago house decades ago, and it’s seen so much. Not just the pencil marks on the door frames or the BB gun hole in the window. It’s been here for everything.

Yes, our dog Max died on the stairs in the middle of the night, and yes, my father’s last seder was in our dining room, where his once booming voice came out in wheezes and whispered blessings.

And yes it held our children’s first dates and kisses and hopefully not much more, and yes to a garden richer with squirrels and rabbits than tomatoes and lettuce. Yes to the tree house where the children played make-believe, then outgrew it, then smoked and drank in it up high in the air as if they were nowhere near watchful eyes.

Yes to the blue couch where Trish healed from the car accident and I recovered from heart surgery and where in different years Hannah held dolls to her heart and ice packs to her mouth and heating pads to her back and tissues to her eyes. And yes to the black piano where the boys protested and where Trish played and sang and filled our world with joy.

And yes to a kitchen table that saw dinosaur egg oatmeal and PBJs and spaghetti and burgers then vegan sandwiches and salads, only salad please, and pints of Graeter’s black raspberry chip ice cream and sourdough after sourdough after sourdough and yes to dinners for five turned to four turned to three turned to two, getting quieter and quieter until you could almost hear our longing as we ate carryout Thai with vintage fine wine.

Yes, I can sell almost anything. Music. Research. A company built from scratch.

I just don’t know how to sell the sacred.

Or tires.