CHEKIT: All the New Yorkers. All of them.

While visiting friends in Detroit the summer after my sophomore year of high school, we happened upon a garage sale. Looking for something to do while waiting for our other friend Hayato to get off work, we pulled in and picked about the old jelly glasses and board games - and came upon a table full of old New Yorkers. This was back when I thought Garrison Keillor was one of the literary lights of the age, and had bought the occasional issue in hopes that one of his stories would appear inside. The dates on the covers corresponded with a time during which he'd contributed a great deal. This was pre-Remnick, pre-Brown, when the fiction was up front - and lots of it - certainly more than what appears now.

"How much?" I asked.

"25 cents apiece," said the woman sitting at the obligatory card table.

They were, for the most part, in perfect condition - untouched, I found out, by the teenage English students who were the woman's former charges, themselves unmoved by Charles Barsotti's thick, wry doodlings or Updike's linguistic cross-hatchings, no matter how much prodding she gave them. There must of been a hundred of them.

I felt for a thin, crumpled wad of bills in my pocket.

"How much," I asked, "for all of them?"

She thought for a moment.

"Five bucks," she said.

The box was turd-heavy, and Chris complained the whole rest of the weekend that there were abandoned houses to be drinking secreted bottles of vodka in - that I should get my ass to the library if I wanted those magazines so badly. Indeed, as I was leaving Detroit, the look on the face of the clerk at the airport, sulkily wrapping shipping tape around the copier paper box full to bursting with Talk of the Town, seemed to say the same.

Still, though - the best five bucks I ever spent. Because anyone can go to a garage sale and find a box full of stories - but how many of us can claim to have discovered, for five dollars, in amongst the Joyce Carol Oates and Graham Coster stories and Asberry poetry, what you want to do for the rest of your life?

15 years later, and for $95 more, you can find your own lucky little card table, too. [Thanks, Jen]