People I Have Met And Loved On Craig's List

In previous posts I have waxed poetic on some of the reasons why I truly love Craigslist. The cornucopia of fascinating stuff, the thrill you get when you stumble onto something great and cheap, the stealth mission of picking up your item and avoiding the perfectly normal looking serial killer. I must admit that as a relatively private person, I feel a peculiar thrill at the thought of being thrust head first into a social situation where the only thing you have in common from buyer to seller is that you want something that this random person has. It's like this giant baton relay race. Here, I don't want this anymore, you take it. And vice versa. Needless to say, the possibilities for human weirdness are endless. And while I wish I had some great dark stories to tell, the sad truth is that I have met some seriously NICE people on Craigslist.

I met one fellow CL junkie who told me that he and his wife furnished their whole house through Craigslist. He shared with me that he schedules all of his pick-ups for the same day and then rents a van and drives around and grabs everything at once to save money. Very brilliant. I had a strikingly handsome couple come to look at two club chairs who turned out to be an actress and a Rabbi and their energy was so wonderful that I wanted to hear their whole life story (which I'm sure was fascinating) and feed them dinner. There was an adorable young couple, with equally adorable cats named Krispy and Bigsby (cat people, I'm in), who were downsizing while they plotted which city out West to move to. I immediately told them to send me their resumes and I connected them to a friend of mine in San Francisco to help them jumpstart their new life. Another young couple rescued an antique dresser of mine and then sent me photos after they had it brilliantly restored and had fixed its broken foot. There was the mom who carted away my son's childhood dresser while I stood misty-eyed in the doorway - a chapter definitely over. And the father and son who came and hauled away the heaviest sofa in the universe, but not before the dad, who was in the rug trade, gave me some good lowdown on the history of my rugs.

All of this and not one axe murderer. The truth is that Craigslist is wired for disaster, and creepiness, and all kinds of bad shit. It's the perfect recipe for the furniture blind date gone wrong. Fortunately, it's also not true. Skeptical as I am, I'm happy to report that humankind continues to amaze me in how gracious and generous and NICE it can be. It doesn't mean that I will let my guard down and start meeting strange men alone on street corners to hand off power tools, but it does restore my faith that people are innately good. And super interesting. In the great relay race of life, I love to look back and remember all of the great people, interesting places and newly amazing batons I've shared. I encourage all of you to get in the game. Ready, set, go.