By ERNIE NEUFELD, Weyburn Review Associate Publisher
Antiquity, we now acknowledge, is a relative condition. Like beauty it's in the eye of the beholder.
Working in my first printing shop as a teenager decades ago, a chap about a year older and myself considered ourselves unreasonably ordered around by two individuals who drew their authority from seniority.
We referred to them rudely as the old b------s. They were, in fact, 35 or 36 years old, and the surviving one only last summer passed into the realm of suspended aging. Needless to say, my perception of human antiquity has changed considerably in the ensuing years.
Nowadays tunes that issued from everyone's lips a few months ago are old, and even to hum them classifies a body with those disrespectfully labeled above.
Then there are things. Objects. Artifacts. They are new, then they are old, and eventually and arbitrarily, it seems, some are tagged as antiques, and miraculously achieve new stature. They acquire a monetary worth often exceeding original retail values. (To some extent, of course, inflation will do that too.) They are prized by collectors and amassed hungrily by those who profit from marketing such treasures.
Raising a family and stoking the avaricious maws of a demanding business enterprise, I was never even tempted to take up or even seriously consider collecting antiques myself. But I'll admit to having been impressed when, at the home of friends not similarly encumbered (or with wiser priorities) proud reference was made to a piece of furniture or ordinary looking artifact as an antique.
Some 20-30 years ago driving with some time on our hands in Ontario, a companion declared an unscheduled stop at a country antique shop. The British lady in charge, spotting us instantly as not-serious visitors, reluctantly - and probably daringly - took us to a handsome little low table I would call a coffee table but which probably had a more prestigious title. Noting with a touch of disdain that almost anything was considered an antique in this part of the world, she proudly told us the prize we were being shown had been "picked up" by her on a recent trip to Jolly Olde. She told us it dated back to the 1400s or some such date and cited a price of thousands of dollars.
We did not take much more of her time, and I stayed away from antique purveyors for many years. I believe it was the last foray into those hallowed grounds until a few years ago when I was talked into a brief stop at an antique market not far from Carlyle. There were surely some fine, vintage articles on display, but I could not believe my eyes when I saw offerings of Saskatchewan Homecoming '71 stationery. With horror I recalled the reams of that stuff acquired as zone chairman for that great tourism initiative, and unceremoniously dumped when the year was over. Of course, had I kept the stuff and sold it now, I would probably be guilty of some crime.
Then early this year, on a day tour of the Paris, Ontario, area about an hour out of Toronto, we were deposited at a huge building called an antique mall at Cambridge, and generously given 75 minutes to browse around until returning to our bus.
Just to depart from custom, I declined to tag along obediently behind my companion; instead chose to scout the premises all by myself. It was awesome. The former factory building, covering 30,000 square feet, was occupied by literally hundreds of little stalls, each crammed as high as the arm might reach with what passes as antiques.
This whole column was to have been devoted to cataloging superficially
- very superficially - the contents, but suffice it to say that
99 percent of the stuff might have been the treasures - or junk
- of the humble home in which I was raised. But to tell you the
truth, I enjoyed every minute of it and my mind even entertained,
ever so briefly, thoughts of adorning a room of my house with
the avails of the place. After all, I'm still young - by some
standards.
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