Writing Life

I’ve said before that Julie and I enjoy browsing antique shops because it allows us to wander through our own pasts. We’ve spent the last three days doing exactly that. On Friday we drove to Placerville, where we whiled away the day visiting six or seven antique shops along Main Street. On Saturday we attended the Sacramento Rare Book Show and Sale at the local Scottish Rite Temple, where we inspected not just rare books but also old posters, postcards, letters, maps, and more. And on Sunday we strolled through an antiques flea market held in the parking lot of a Carmichael strip mall. It was at the Carmichael event that I witnessed a perfect example of how an antique store or flea market can work as a collective memory repository for the community it serves. Julie and I were browsing through one of the market stalls when a woman in an adjacent stall let out a little shriek. The cause of this outburst was a slender children’s book called “The Animal Dictionary.” The shopper turned to the proprietor of the stall and said, “This was my daughter’s favorite book when she was a child. She’s 42 now, but I used to read this to her every night when she was a little girl. Her favorite animal was the alligator. She used to call it ‘the alligeegee.’”

Quite naturally, the proprietor of the stall suggested that the shopper purchase the book and give it to her daughter. But the shopper suddenly seemed reluctant to do so. She set the book down. She picked it up again. She stood there and slowly flipped through its pages. Finally she set it down and walked away without it. There is a whole world of story possibilities in that non-purchase. Ernest Hemingway is reputed to have written a moving and mysterious short story in just six words: For Sale: Baby shoes – never worn. Whether or not the story was by Hemingway, I think it is a good one and I have meditated on it long and often. Why were the shoes never worn? Did the baby die? Was it ever even conceived? And who exactly is selling those enigmatic shoes? Those six words raise a multitude of questions. Likewise, the actions of the shopper at yesterday’s flea market raise a lot of intriguing questions. Why didn’t she buy the book? I doubt that money was an issue, because the price of the book was a mere fifty cents. Does the woman no longer speak to her daughter? Are there painful memories connected with her daughter’s early years that she would rather not revisit? Is she unhappily divorced from her daughter’s father? I cannot answer these questions. But if I had to guess, I’d say that the answer is a fairly simple one. The book, having triggered a memory, had done all it could possibly do for the woman. Once the memory returned, the woman had no further need for the book. If, however, the copy of “The Animal Dictionary” at yesterday’s flea-market had been the exact same copy that the shopper had read to her daughter roughly forty years ago, the outcome of the little encounter I witnessed probably would have been different. If the book contained an inscription or some other indisputable evidence that it was the actual “Animal Dictionary” that her daughter once held in her hands, I am certain the shopper would have purchased it, even if the price had been ten dollars. You can mass-produce a book but you cannot mass-produce a memory. In this instance, the memory is more important than the book. But if the shopper had somehow discovered her daughter’s old copy of “The Animal Dictionary,” the book and the memory would be one and the same, indivisible. A duplicate copy of some beloved old object from our early years can reawaken sleeping memories, but only the original object carries the talismanic power to put us into direct contact with our pasts. I have learned this from first-hand experience.

When I was thirteen years old, my parents gave me a portable radio that was round, blue, and roughly the size of a softball. This particular style of radio – known officially as the Panapet R-70 – was extremely popular in the 1970s and Panasonic produced millions of them. I grew very attached to my radio. The first time I ever heard Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” or the Eagles’ “One of These Nights,” I was listening to my R-70. From the age of 13 through the age of 18, I listened to the broadcasts of hundreds of sporting events on that radio – mostly Portland Trailblazer basketball games and Portland Buckaroo hockey games. And late at night, I would lie in bed and pick up the signals of radio stations in far-off cities such as Salt Lake and Denver and even, if the atmospheric conditions were just right, my future hometown of Sacramento. I loved that radio but, for some reason, I left it behind when I moved out of my parents’ house.

In the last few years vintage R-70s have become quite commonplace at antique shops and flea markets. The first time I came across one, at a yard sale, I gave Julie a long, rambling account of my love affair with my own R-70. Naturally, she suggested that I buy the yard-sale radio. But I refrained from doing so. The yard-sale radio was yellow. “I’ll wait till I find a blue one,” I told her. Every few months, at some antique shop or garage sale, we’d come across a vintage R-70, but always it was a white one or a red one or a green one or a yellow one, and so I would opt not to buy it. And then, one day, Julie found a blue R-70 at some seedy little thrift shop we were browsing in. It was a working model, in perfect condition, and priced at only five dollars. I had no excuse for not buying it. I picked it up and inspected it carefully. I loosened the screw that held the two halves together and glanced at the radio’s interior. I played with the tuning and volume knobs. And then, like the shopper at yesterday’s flea market, I set the object back down on the shelf and walked away from it. I had no desire to buy it. After all, it was just one of millions of copies of my own R-70. I had no special connection to that particular copy. And, unlike a copy of an old beloved book, the radio possessed no unique content that I couldn’t live without.

My own R-70 is a fetish object possessed of talismanic powers, and if my parents should happen to find it in some dark corner of their basement, I would be delighted to have it returned to me. But mere copies of my R-70 possess no such talismanic power. They are reminders of my past, but they are not relics of it. I already own my past. I don’t need to purchase cheap reproductions of it. But that doesn’t mean that a reproduction can’t serve a valuable purpose as an aide-memoire. Nearly every time I visit an antique sale, I come across something – a Franciscan-ware table setting, a stuffed Snoopy, a Hummel figurine – that is virtually identical to one that resided in the house I grew up in. Antique stores are the museums of ordinary human lives. Unlike the Smithsonian or the Louvre, they don’t house original cultural icons such as Charles Lindbergh’s The Spirit of St. Louis or Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.” Instead, they house the cheap old radios and battered picture books and cracked dinnerware that are the touchstones of ordinary people’s lives. I enjoy visiting museums. Viewing the contents of King Tut’s tomb at the de Young museum in San Francisco was an awe-inspiring experience for me. And when I saw Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, it literally brought tears to my eyes. Rarely do I have an awe-inspiring or tear-inducing experience in an antiques shop. What I experience there is nostalgia, for my own past and for the recent past in general – not the past as you find it in history books, which consists mainly of the extraordinary exploits of kings and conquerors, but the past of everyday human life as it has been lived by 99 percent of the people who ever walked the earth, people like me, and Julie, and the mother of the alligeegee girl. It is a past every bit as valuable as Cromwell’s or George Washington’s or King Tut’s. And its curators are those people, usually slightly odd and bookish, sometimes friendly but often curmudgeonly and almost always wearing outdated clothing styles, who own and operate your local antique shops.

Large national retail chains have infiltrated, co-opted, and in many cases cheapened nearly every aspect of American life. Food, clothes, books, electronics, hardware – sales of these items are nowadays dominated by massive national chain stores. But to my knowledge there is no such thing as a national antiques chain store. At least not yet. Like the wares they sell, antique stores are a holdover from an earlier and simpler time, a time when just about everything one purchased came from a store owned and operated by a member of one’s own community. Object lessons in how form follows function, the antique stores that house relics of our recent past are themselves one of the last remaining holdovers from that past. Someday corporate America will figure out how to sell antiques in big box stores located in busy shopping centers. But that prospect, like Hemingway’s baby shoes, is almost too sad to contemplate.