The Antique Shop In The Autumn

THE ANTIQUE SHOP IN THE AUTUMN - BRINGING THAT "HOMESTEAD HARVEST" AURA INDOORS

     As a snotty-nosed, dirty-faced kid, growing up on Burlington's Harris Crescent, a block up from the Lakeshore, the autumn season was deliciously haunted and abounding with nostalgia; at a time when, for gosh sakes, I had no idea what that all meant. As my mother always told our friends, "Teddy is an old soul," which I later understood it to mean, in her opinion as my birth mother, I had lived many times previously, putting some miles on an apparently well travelled soul. I probably started a few wars in my day as well, like the ones I used to spark here in South Muskoka, with my political agitating.
     Everything I work at today, whether it is a writing project, or hunting and gathering antiques for our shop, I can trace it back to those beautiful days of youth, mucking about in what I always believed was a story-book neighborhood, with neat 1930's vintage houses and apartment buildings that were simply adorned and highly functional as safe dwelling places for many families. I believe I was about a year old when we arrived at the Nagy Apartments, and at about five years of age, after a brief apprenticeship as a neighborhood voyeur, my mother set me loose to discover the actuality of the home region. It was great. There were two cul-de'sacs at both ends of Harris Crescent, and in the middle was a market garden, that seemed to always provide the scent of fresh produce and rich earth. I could hear the sound of laker fog-horns on the way to school on misty autumn mornings, and the hunting and gathering of chestnuts was a favorite time of year for me, as I collected hundreds of them to and from school. There were chestnut trees at the bottom of Torrance Avenue, that rose gently from the Lakeshore Boulevard, connecting with Harris Crescent at the top of the hill. On the hillside, about halfway up, was an old brick house, part of a once important estate, backing onto the green belt we called the "Ravine," where Ramble Creek babbled its way down to Lake Ontario.
     It was very much like many of the Trish Romance paintings of grand estates, set into magnificent, towering hardwoods, with their painted leaves and play of light and shadow throughout the day. It was a house that was about to be demolished, after a period of several years being abandoned to meet its fate. I felt sorry for that magnificent structure.
     When I wander through our Gravenhurst antique shop after closing, trying to straighten some piles of askew books, and off-kilter paintings, and enjoy the ambience of a lot of neat old stuff, I can't help but think back to those innocent days of youth, when I willingly, without a single reservation, allowed myself to be influenced by the patina of the late 1950's and early 60's in Southern Ontario. Maybe it was the allure of black and white television that our family worshipped as a livingroom icon. Possibly it was the daily sight of the Eatons and Simpson's delivery trucks back and forth through the neighborhood, the milk and bread delivery trucks, and of course the knife sharpener man on his three wheeled bike with all the compartments built onto the frame. I made a very serious point of trying to memorize it all, possibly anticipating that my life's mission would be to one day represent the period as both a writer and antique and collectable buyer and seller. It was a compelling period of my life as if the beginning of a five and a half decade apprenticeship to get it right. I was a watcher in the woods you might say, and from any other portal I could find, where I could hideaway and check out the action unfolding just beyond. It used to drive my mother nuts, because I'd be out of sight for considerable periods of time, and when she yelled for me to come home, it was usually when something great was happening near by that held me steadfast, as the historian in training.
     When I wax nostalgic about how I got started in this antique / heritage partnership, I naturally start at the point I opened my first shop in Bracebridge, and within months, getting my first gig as a writer / historian, working for the Muskoka Board of Education. But it does go much further back when I study on where my interests were first cultivated, and it requires my focus back on those dear, exciting formative years, in Burlington, where I had soakers (my shoes being wet) every day, including the winter, and I was usually covered in soot from playing too close to the Lakeshore Public School coal chute, and having bulges in all my available pockets, stuffed to overflowing with the "remains" of the day, to borrow the title of a movie I happened to like. All my values in this pursuit of heritage and relics comes from those days scouring the neighborhood for cast off stuff, especially rich on garbage days, and then hauling out all kinds of natural history from the ravine of Ramble Creek, where it seemed I spent the most time besides being in our apartment. Before school I walked the banks and I raced home after school to skip stones, and walk back and forth across the limestone slaps that bridged the creek in several locations. It was the sanctuary where I found my first sweetheart, a sweet girl from my class, who used to live in a small house backing against the creek. Angela used to invite me to her house after school, to join her on the swing set, that creaked in its rusty character through the misty woods of the deep ravine. I owe a lot to those memories, because they influenced me in a most positive way, and the way I've pursued collecting, and set up the shop, well, it's pretty much as if I'm re-creating all those charming influences from my youth; nature always being a pivotal component of our design, and intent to augment the collection. I always keep a goodly number of nature-related books in stock, and I'm a big fan, as you might gather, of landscape art, many paintings showing off scenes like I remember from my childhood. I may be obsessed but at least I'm happily employed by its intrusion, which, by the way, I have always welcomed heartily.
     A while back, knowing my inherent love of history and for all things storied and old, a friend asked about the kind of books I had enjoyed growing up. I suppose she thought I had come from a home where there were shelves over shelves of books by Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, Sir Walter Scott and Wordsworth. Alas, I was from a family that had more interest in television than books, and although I had some beat-up bedtime stories from the Brothers Grimm, I had to count on the school and public library for my reading material. There was however, one favorite collectable magazine in our residence, that became by tenure, a coffee table book; the first and only one I remember getting this kind of respect from my mother. Believe it or not, it was a Thanksgiving issue of "Ideals" magazine, and I must have read that publication a hundred times up to the time I moved out to get my own apartment. I will always have a soft spot for those wonderfully nostalgic Ideals magazines.
     When I walk by the 1950's circa Philips television in the shop foyer, I don't feel any sense of betrayal, having been lured into the Wide World of Disney, The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan (with Mary Martin of course), A Christmas Carol, and hundreds of other movies and sitcoms that influenced the collector-me. I loved those times and I set up a course of action where they could be preserved in part, and enjoyed all over again. It's true that "time waits for no man," but nostalgia buffs don't get weighed down by philosophy however well meaning; unless we coined it ourselves to represent our interests.
     I have always been a sentimental fool, as Suzanne calls me on days like this, when she senses correctly that I'm lost in my daydreams again. But I'm in the perfect business in this regard, and when a customer comments that our collection has brought back a lot of pleasant memories, I'm delighted to have been of some assistance in this regard. While many of my writing contemporaries argue that you can't live in the past, and although as a realist, I whole heartedly agree, I choose instead, to allow myself the human privilege of keeping one foot in the fantasy, generated by an over-active imagination, the other foot set down solidly in contemporary existence. My reality, in this case, thank goodness, is just as loaded full of fantasy as my daydreams, except in this sense, it's our antique and collectable shop, where nostalgia and fantasy dance together the whole live long day.