Antiquing

HAMLET To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole?

HORATIO 'Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.

HAMLET No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it: as thus: Alexander died, Alexander was buried,
Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of
earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he
was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw!

After a pleasant lunch yesterday with my Momma, I decided to stop by and check out some of the antique shops on South Congress Avenue. There's a whole row of them there where fashionable people go to waste money and be kitschy.

The last one I went into was a huge warehouse full of everything from 50's-era ashtrays, radios, and blenders to vintage clothing, funky lamps, and John F. Kennedy memorial busts. I don't know who runs the place, but they have a real sense of decor in how they've arranged all those tens of thousands of items into some sort of thematic flow. It is a very interesting place to spend a half-hour or so.

But what sent me away with a profound sadness that had overcome even my fascination was the sense that I had just walked through a house of death. What thing in there hadn't been a part of someone's life that had survived them? Every particle of that detritus ---now sporting price tags and fancily arrayed across every available surface--- had been made or bought or received with some, maybe nobler, purpose in mind than to what it was reduced to now, which was nothing but to be a commodity to decorate some systems analyst's condo.

It was depressing. Especially the baskets and buckets full of many hundreds, maybe thousands, of black and white photos. There were even some tintypes laid out. How could these things have ever come to such a sorry state? I went through some of them, looking into the eyes of anonymous people who lived in those captured moments 50, 60, 70 years before me now. And I turned them over: no names, no clues. Why were those images now a part of some mouldering, unidentifiable pile? How could they have been let go? Did no one think enough to save them?

We cannot keep the past intact forever, that's true. But the truth of that has never made what we do to forget it any less painful.