There’s this book my mom used to read to me when I was little: Caps for Sale. A very dapper cap peddler with a curly mustache wears all of his caps stacked atop his head. He stops to nap under a tree, and a pack of monkeys steals all of the caps except his own.
He wakes and shakes his finger at the monkeys, but they only copy him. He stomps his feet and shakes his hands, but the monkeys just do the same. Eventually he throws his cap down in anger and marches away—but the monkeys imitate that, too, and the peddler can collect his caps from the ground and continue on: “Caps for sale! Caps for sale! Fifty cents a cap!”
At Princeton, the end of the year means finals, reading period—a week without classes, during which students prepare for their exams—and move-out. Students, most of which are not from around Princeton, have to figure out what to do with overstuffed dorms full of books, furniture, clothes, and appliances.
Hence the spring sale. Students, especially seniors, email-blast everyone with Google Slides sets of everything they don’t want to store over the summer. Formal dresses, coffee machines, PC setups, and even Subarus are photographed, priced, and arranged on slide decks with the student-peddler’s contact information and a pickup location. The savvy underclassman can score great deals on dorm supplies, and the tired senior can reduce the amount of stuff they need to cart with them in one of the big, rectangular roller bins that magically appear on campus at the end of the term.
As the slideshows have flooded my email inbox, I can’t stop thinking about that little mustachioed cap peddler from Caps for Sale—for some reason, each email seems to prompt the call “Caps for sale! Fifty cents a cap!” in my finals-addled head when it appears at the top of my inbox. Someone is selling a guitar, a keyboard, and a heated blanket. Someone else, a ramen bowl, a frying pan, and BTS tickets. There was one guy selling a 1-pound bag of chemical fire retardant.
I’ve purchased a few pieces of clothing—track pants, someone’s old semiformal dress. Mostly, though, the “Caps for sale!” mantra clanging around in my head has made me feel like one of the monkeys from the picture book: the seniors are setting their wares down to rest, and myself and the other underclassmen are picking up the pieces, imitating their movements, and learning from their example.
The recycling of the college student’s material things back into the younger classes of students feels like a symbolic representation of how the knowledge of the upperclassman is passed down into the younger classes, particularly as it exists at Princeton. Cross-year friendships flourish here. One of my friends, a sophomore, was gifted her senior friend’s eating club merch. A freshman I know received a junior’s old textbooks for a class he’s going to take in the fall.
Buying people’s old things from a spring sale slideshow probably isn’t teaching me that much about how to be a Princeton student, but it does feel like a downstream effect of the lovely cyclicity of this campus, and how successive classes of Princetonians build on what their classmates before them have begun. When I’m a senior, I swear, my sale will be cheap and useful—maybe not fifty-cents-a-cap-cheap, but enough to give the Princetonians succeeding me a boost into life here. And unlike the cap peddler, I’ll be glad to see their faces staring down at me, wearing my old things.