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 When
I was a kid, I seemed to always be short of spending money. A trait that has
carried over to this very day. I suppose I received an allowance from my
parents, but what that was I can’t seem to recall. It certainly wasn’t much.
Not to worry, I could always find some way or another to make money. One of the
more lucrative ventures that I embarked upon was to offer to clean out garages
for folks in our neighborhood. Now, the job entailed sweeping, straightening up
the place and generally getting everything in order. I usually charged a dollar.
The kicker was that I got to keep all of the soda bottles that were in the
garage. In those days, a regular Coke bottle would get you 2 cents back in
deposit and a giant bottle of something called Canada Dry would get you a
nickel. Usually I’d get about four or five bucks from the deposits alone. Then
if I were real lucky the owners would ask me to haul off some stuff they no
longer wanted and they didn’t want to fool with any longer. This is when I
would strike the mother lode. We lived in an area of town that had probably 45
so called ‘antique’ shops. So, I’d load up this old wagon of mine with
enough stuff to overload a mule and make the rounds of these ‘antique’
stores to get the best prices. It’s funny to me that when you buy stuff from a
store like this…anything you buy is valuable and of course, rare. When you are
10 or 11 years old and selling stuff, just the opposite is true. I can’t tell
you how many times I’ve heard …"”Must have a 1,000 of them, kid,
can’t offer you but (insert low price here) …take it or leave it.” Of
course I took it, I never once wanted to haul any of that junk back home.. I
remember I was permanently banned from one establishment, which had the dubious
name of “The Trash and Treasure Shop.”
The owner of this place was really hard to deal with any time I brought
stuff in to sell. Finally one day, I told him….”I’ve seen all of your
trash…do you really have any treasure?” He told me in no uncertain terms,
using some words I’d never heard before to leave and never darken his doorway
again. I didn’t make a lot of money, but I got by and I learned a lot. Buy
real low, sell real high. This past weekend all of this came back to me since we
were in a small town for the wedding of one of my sons. Not having much to do,
we hit the ‘antique’ stores on Saturday and look for stuff none of us
needed. It brought a ton of memories flooding back to me. Many of the things
that I had sold for pennies were now selling for hundreds of dollars. Junk and
more junk that hard working people had paid me to haul off, was sitting on the
shelves of these stores after all of these years. Talk about your trip down
memory lane. I love to listen to people talk about the things for sale in
antique shops. “My Grandmother had one of those.” “We had one of those
just like that, when I was a kid.” “I haven’t seen one of those in
years.” “Why, I’ve thrown 4 or 5 of those away at one time or another.”
I’ll bet the people who work in these places could write a book about all of
the goofy things people tell them each and every day. My question is, how can
pure everyday, ordinary items that we have used and most likely worn out and are
really junk, become antiques? What makes us pay hundreds of dollars for
something that cost a dime 75 years ago? The really strange thing to me, is that
here I am buying some of this stuff again, that I sold years and years ago. So,
who’s goofy? Obviously it’s me that has taken leave of his senses. We have
no room for more stuff, but we buy anyway. For what purpose? To relive our
youth? To give us a sense of identity? No, I think it’s because we just like
stuff. We don’t need it, we can’t really use it, because it’s old, we just
want it. Maybe it helps us get through this process called life…who knows? The
sad thing is that most of our stuff will probably end up being sold to some body
again when we pass on to our next reward and then the stuff will end up sitting
on a shelf in some small town when our grandkids come by. Then they’ ll.
say…”Oh look, my grandmother had one of those just like that…” Then
they’ll buy it and stick it in some display cabinet back home, where it will
sit for another 40 or 50 years and before long…it becomes an antique. My
wife’s grandmother had the best perspective on this stuff. We tried to get her
to go into one of these stores years ago. She told us she’d rather wait in the
car. “It was ugly when I was a girl…and it’s still ugly now.” Wise words
to remember. Comments go to www.pearyperry.com.
Complaints go to me care of the Mars Probe at NASA. They’ll find me.
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