Our first dabble in antiques

 

Picture us, a young married couple, in a newly purchased home trying to fill it with furniture. We headed to Toronto's Harbourfront on a sunny winter's day, where the largest antique market in the city is open on Sundays. Having set out late in the afternoon, the purchase of this dining set and secretary was made hurriedly & decisively as closing time was honing in on both the seller & the buyers. All the pieces are from the 1920s and we only meant to purchase the much-needed dining set, but somehow we haggled our way into buying the secretary & a couple of tin decorative plates.

We had settled on a Friday delivery (for which I even took the day off work) and the weather had dramatically changed to blizzard-like conditions. As the day progressed with more snow & still a furniture no-show, I began to worry that I'd have to seat my guests on the floor the next day for our very first dinner party. Finally the delivery men arrived, harried & tense, after negotiating their truck up the Don Valley Parkway, the windy-est highway Toronto has, to unload my precious cargo. I don't remember who was more relieved, me for having my dinner party saved from disaster, or the delivery men for having reached their destination unscathed.

To me, the memory of that original day, a winter's day verging on being spring-like, was that I was happy with my life, doing all those type of adulty aspirational things that people do. Before that, I felt like I was some sort of fraud, but the act of buying a house & filling it with historical pieces of someone else's life all helped dispel those feelings that "I'm not doing it right". Perhaps it was the "patchworking" of my history to the fabric of someone else's history through these antiques which helped ground me in the ordinariness of human life. 

So when Orest now complains that the secretary has finished meeting our needs & is just a junk repository, I am somewhat less inclined to give it the heave-ho than he is. I'm too sentimental, I guess.

My family’s Art

 I couldn't tell you who the artist is, where it came from or when it was painted or bought, but I do know one thing: I like it.

I have always appreciated not only the scene depicted within, but the frame as well. My first memories of it was of me staring at it in our living room in New Jersey, on my mother's fashionable (or what she thought was fashionable) avocado-green leather furniture. I would contemplate it for long periods time when I was bored, or trying to escape the scorching humidity of New Jersey summers. I would channel the wintry scene to either help cool me down, or invoke calming thoughts of snow quieting the noises outside. Some of my more creative moments of my teenage years came while sitting in front of that painting and I will treasure that forever.

I'm grateful to my brother, who was the caretaker of this piece while we travelled the world and who generously allowed me to have it when we moved back to North America.

My Father’s gift

 

A friend of mine once told me that she is so totally grossed out by old wooden spoons and cutting boards that she has to bin them. Apparently, when faced with the 'furry' quality of the wood surface, her mind instantly turned to unhygienic thoughts of germs and bacteria infiltrating her food.

I thought long and hard about it and although I agree with her, I'll never be able to part with my old cutting board. It was made and gifted to me by my father, and in similar vein to my mother's piano, it comprises a very small collection of things passed down to me by him. 

My father, or Tato, was about 18 years old when he was captured by the Germans and sent to work in a munitions factory in West Prussia (near Gdansk). As I recounted in a previous blog, it was very lucky that he survived the war, and fought hard to bring his 4 brothers & sisters & parents to Canada for a better life. He did this by first help building a remote Hydro dam in northern Ontario to pay for his passage, and then his remaining family's. 

At Des Joachim Hydro dam, he learned carpentry & woodworking skills that would carry him from being used for work, to creating wonderful things for himself & his loved ones. 

This is the only example I have of his craft & will treasure it always.

Global piano

 I'll start my exploration of valued possessions with one of my oldest possessions; my Mother's piano. Obviously the piano has a track record for having travelled the world. First starting with my Mother; having bought it Toronto in the 70's, took it to New Jersey & Oklahoma, and it returned to my possession in Toronto upon her death.

My Mother died when she was only 53 years old, so it was already a priceless possession in my mind, because I would never get anything else from her ever again. 

The piano followed us on our travels to Poland, the UK and now Boston. Despite its part in my children’s obstacle course in the front lounge & its role as a mouse habitat, it has never needed anything other than a clean-up or tuning. 

On its last trip, however, I was very close to losing this priceless memory of my Mother that I will never forget. For anyone doing a transatlantic move, they will be familiar with some of the added caution moving companies use to ensure your belongings arrive safe & sound & having done my homework, I chose a company that included having a special crate made to transport my piano safely to its destination. While I was supervising the move on the UK side, I noticed that although they had taped the piano with several layers of carton, I still hadn't seen hide nor hair of this specially-built wooden crate. I was assured by the movers over the 2 days of packing that it would be in a crate, and even when I returned on the final morning to the now empty house & the piano somewhere on the truck, I was assured that it had indeed been packaged correctly.

Imagine my horror, when helping on the Boston end to unpack the track, that I noticed the all too-familiar shape of my beloved piano encased in only 2 layers of cheap cardboard, with 3 more cartons stacked on top of it!!! Perhaps it was the stress of moving, or the gut punch of feeling that I was losing that one strand of thread connecting me to my mother, but I presented those fine gentlemen to a fit of epic proportions. Unfortunately for me, that included quite a bit of waterworks, which took some of the oomph away from my righteous fury of a customer denied their contractual obligations. 

After much empathy and support from these guiltless guys in coveralls, we were able to gently unload & unpack the piano and find that it had not suffered any catastrophic damage, thank goodness! 

Although it still stands today as an object mostly unused, it will always be a shrine to my mother, her voice & her talent.

Things of value

 I recently had a conversation with my high school friends about the value we assign our possessions, after recounting the disappointing day I had trying to clean cat poo from a chair. It wasn't the fact that the front hall chair had any meaning for me, and as my daughter pointed out, we should be grateful for our health and the fact that we have these little fur-babies to keep us company. 

It got me thinking though... why do we look at some of our things and make such a big fuss if something happens to them?  A lot of the time it was the time and effort made to make the decision of that purchase, sometimes it was because it was a hand-made irreplaceable object and sometimes, the memories of where, when & with whom we were with when we obtained the object makes us cry tears of real emotional pain when our dog vomits on it.

I'd like to catalogue some of these items here in this blog. It might be just for me, but who knows, maybe years from now, my children will decide to keep an object handed down to them from me based on this knowledge, instead of assigning it to a future scrap heap.