The Antique Shop

Of course it’s my mother I am thinking of, my mother as she was in those dreams, saying It’s nothing, just this little tremor; saying with such astonishing lighthearted forgiveness, Oh, I know you’d come some day. My mother surprising me, and doing it almost indifferently... My mother moving almost carelessly out of her old prison, showing options and powers I never dreamed she had, changes more than herself. She changes the bitter lump of love I have carried all this time into a phantom - something useless and uncalled for, like a phantom pregnancy.

“Friend of My Youth” by Alice Munro

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Dear Alex,

Why are we intrigued more by the oddities rather than the regularities of daily living?

Last Saturday I discovered for my first time an antique store in local downtown. For over two hours, I peered into the most intimate inimitable troughs of livelihood and manhood, the moods of time travel. I was invited to intrude, slip between the sentries of the heart, my Alexandra laughing, leaving then for me now.

Round the shelves and down the rows came rushing the dramas of past in modern replay. Raggedy Ann, legs spread over a spill of fun in pail, floated her glee behind glass cover. Oh I missed her and the books in frayed jackets that had weathered shipwreck and measles, the stuff of elves and socks bundled in spell. For $ 790, a Remington typewriter propped on its original blackbox could be yours.

“Friend of My Youth”, a short story by Alice Munro, feels like a reverie as modern as vintage vinyl. I re-read its first through last lines as they read back to me. But I couldn’t understand it; I followed the text but missed the context. If I were to scandalize Munro’s plot with a Coles Notes cut, I would say this is what it looks like: the storyteller recalls her mother in younger years before mother ages and passes away.

Mother is a schoolteacher who boards with a household of two sisters, the younger married and mentally mad, the elder stoic and chaste. There are love triangles and deaths, tenderness and bile, all swooped up in the lick of town hall gossip. The narrator jostles between recollecting her late mother in fine vs. decaying health. After 12 pages in simple words, the last short passage reads as an erection of facts about the revered history of the land: the forefathers of the clan battle while “singing the seventy-fourth and the seventy-eighth of Psalms”, their war horses trampling on the bishop and their minister axing “all other preachers in the world”.

To say the story has shaken me to my marrows is an understatement. I couldn’t stop fussing over it in mind, confounded by its title and common language, shocked by the phantom message familiar and detached as the prizes of life obsolete on display at the antique shop. The ordinary viewing of old objects make you shimmy between the right and left brain, imagine and structure. You think you see what the thing is used for - that cast iron scale to weigh spices and capsules, or this hand-stitched doll for love - but the stories housing every tagged item on platform remain unopened.

Friend, youth, mine. We don’t go to museums or antique malls to reclaim an era neatly and categorically sectioned in pods of theme and interest. You’ll be disappointed to find no inspiration when you stare at the plainest cotton in sight, a musky apron tied to the rack without its wearer, the cookbooks comics calendars in the collectors’ corner. Our routine business, your in’s and out’s of doors and dreams, our everyday high’s and flat tires speaking about our hiddenness and naked ignorance - these are the things we are really looking for in any visit, friendship and commonplace, our personal and cosmic spheres crashing on Christmas.

Yours, Kate