the rummage sale

If you like Seriously, So Blessed because you like laughing at yourself and your culture, then it's quite likely you'll enjoy The Rummage Sale as well.

From the jacket cover: "The Rummage Sale presents what appear at first to be randomly gathered odds and ends -- not just stories, but letters, journal entries, photographs, poems, notes, and even the contents of a box. Yet what finally emerges is a tapestry, a collection of fictional pieces subtly created and linked together through characters and events, a community of lives. [...] In this book [former BYU professor] Donald R. Marshall [...] has drawn fascinating portraits of people we feel we must surely know or remember."

The characters in The Rummage Sale are Mormons from Utah. They have names like Floydene and Verdell. They come from towns like Ephriam and Paragonah. They travel the world, but can't quite enjoy it. They write to their missionaries and convince themselves they've been proposed to. They participate in ward bazaars and bake their children cookies. They worry when no one wants to marry them, and they travel back to their missions to see if that one hot Italian girl really is "the one." It's a rummage sale of lives, a collection of hilarious (and some serious...though mostly hilarious) snapshots of people we're sure we've met somewhere.

I loved the book, and was so happy when, a short time ago, my mom sent me an extra copy she found while cleaning out their basement. I laughed out loud during:

• "All the Cats in Zanzibar"
  
• "May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You"
• "And What Are You Going to Do Next Year, Miss Dodds?"
• "A Change of Scenery"
  
• "Somehow They Always Seem to Change It" and
  
• "You'll Never Believe It"

And I wanted to cry during:

• "Minna"
• "The Sound of Drums" and
• "Notes on a Calendar Found in an Empty House after the Death of Viola Pratt"

The stories are capable of standing alone, but they're much better when weaved together in a tapestry. Pick yourselves up a copy. You won't be sorry.