Silence Can Be Golden

Facing hard times, David’s family’s 80 acres of land was sold to a distant relative, and suddenly what they had spent decades building was gone. For years, David dreamed of getting that land back and rebuilding the family business.

And then the land appeared at auction, and David and his father decided to do their best to collect whatever monies they could to get it back. They spent weeks and weeks trying to earn the money to reclaim their land, and when the day of the auction arrived, they were saddened to see some 200 other farmers gathered to bid on the land.

All that work and it looked like they had no chance. When the auctioneer announced David’s family’s land, they placed their bid and waited to see what happened.

Silence. The entire room went quiet. David didn’t understand what was going on and even the auctioneer was shocked; he tried to solicit other bids, but was met with silence. He called a break, and then reconvened the auction once, twice, three more times and still not a single farmer other than David and his father bid on the land. The auctioneer had no choice but to accept David’s bid, and suddenly he and his father had their farm back.

Two hundred other farmers, who could have used that land, and could have probably outbid David, stayed silent so the family farm could go back to its first family.

Miracles do happen; good people do exist; the right things can get done.

Lesson learned.

Real Farmacy

I Love a Garage Sale

I love a good auction … and by auction, I mean, garage sale … because, let’s be real, an auction is really nothing more than a rich man’s garage sale. Someone has some junk they don’t want anymore because they’re moving, or they’ve been evicted, or … something … so they decide to sell it all. And the only real difference between an auction and a garage sale is that most times the auction house doesn’t staple ‘For Sale’ signs to telephone poles in the neighborhood. And, okay, sometimes auctions have better hand-me-downs.

Like at Christie’s auction house this week where a 1969 Francis Bacon triptych — “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” — sold for a whopping $142.4 million.

And here I thought the ceramic cat salt and pepper shakers I got at a yard sale in Smallville for 25-cents was a good buy.

The price for the triptych, which depicts Bacon’s friend Lucian Freud perched on a wooden chair, was almost double the $85 million Christie’s had estimated. It also toppled the previous record set in May 2012 when Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” sold at Sotheby’s for $119.9 million.

One man’s trash is another man’s $142 million check, I guess, though I'm betting you can get the same thing at Home Goods for about $49.99.

Unless someone has one in their attic they wanna sell.