Week-end Adventures
Friday night I had dinner with my mom. She went out of town this week-end so I wasn’t able to be with her on Mother’s Day.ÂÂ
Friday night and Saturay I went on a retreat with my church. Shane Claiborne, who is a friend of my pastor’s, came out from Philly to talk to us about what it looks like to live in community with out neighbors: people from our church, those around us who live in poverty, and people around the world. I really like Shane, he’s smart and such a nice guy. And it was really nice to get out of the city for a little while and be surrounded by trees. I miss them when I am in the city!
We had break-out sessions where we got to share ideas about living in community and what we want to do and what we want it to look like. I think we’re going to start a gardening group and a food co-op. I’m very excited about this. I don’t have any space to garden, I live in an apartment; but I could grow herbs for the whole group in containers: basil, rosemary, oregano…and trade them for tomatoes and peppers. This has the advantage of knowing that our produce is organic, without feeling guilty because I’m paying quite three times as much for it while knowing in the back of my mind that a lot of the kids I work with down here in Over the Rhine would be thrilled to have any fresh veggies at all, much less organic ones. And I have friends who live on farms and raise their animals free-range and hormone free (mainly because it’s easier and more economical for small farms to do things this way; lucky for us!); so we’re going to look into buying our meat and poultry from them. And maybe getting together once or twice a month to bake bread! And if we could find somebody with a crabapple tree we could make our own jelly, because crabapples don’t need any pectin or gelatin to be added in order to make jelly. 
On the way home we stopped at an antique place or two. I got a dresser! Yay! My clothes can stop being partly on the floor. And we met some really great people along the way.
The sign for the first Antique place read, “Fort Ancient Trading Post - Indian Relics - Antiques” and on the door was a notice that read “Open - Come on in, we’ll be right over.” (Their house was apparently near-by). The man who came right over was a solid, quiet, slow-moving sort of man in a red-checked shirt. I’ll post a picture of him later if I can. Yes, there really is a place in Ohio called Fort Ancient. It was a Native American settlement and then a pioneer settlement, and there are still all sorts of burial mounds about where the natives buried their dead. Very sacred place. So of course we parade any number of noisy school children around it in the hopes that they’ll get some idea of how big and old and interesting the lovely world we live in is, and that they are neither the first nor the most important, and certainly not the most interesting, generation and civilization to grace it.
So we walked into this antique shop, to be confronted by a wall of old metal traps and the beautiful musty smell of a house older than my great great grandfather would be, were he alive today. In fact, it wasn’t a house at all; it was originally a church, and a church it remained until 1918. Then it was I’ve no idea what, until it became an antique shop, I’ve no idea when. With a notice on your way out the door that read, “Anyone caught stealing will be shot and questions will be asked later.” And there it stands now, with a well out front, jammed to bursting with beads, arrowheads, ax and tomahawk heads, lanterns, snowshoes, jewelry, dolls, music boxes, magazines, books, furniture, metal lunchboxes, old chandeliers, coins, stamps, old GI equipment and, tucked away in a back corner, a gorgeous basin and pitcher stand wich must be a hundred years old, with a little shelf and two sconces for candles and two racks for little towels. Don’t I wish I had the money for it!
The second antique place we stopped at was actually somebody’s house. And a quite new one, built in the fifties or sixties I suppose. The man who lives there refinishes furniture, and my flatmate had met him a few days before, and his name is Jim Miracle. He showed us his parakeet; his cat Miss Mitutsi who belonged to the neighbor lady until several months ago, when she passed away and it adopted the Miracle famly; a 1947 University of Cincinnati yearbook; and a lot of old books and things he’d gotten from the estate sale of an old gay man who, after his wife died, scandalized and alienated his family by taking up with an artist and living his lifestyle openly, getting into art and opera and literature in the process. Then Jim Miracle sold me a chest of drawers that I like a lot. No picture of him. I tried to take one of his cat but it got scared and ran under the car to hide.
May 16th, 2006 at 11:23 am
Antiques stores are the greatest. They’re like second hand bookstores in that you know the people who own them must have great stories about how and why they ended up earning their living in such a way. Delightful eccentricity is an absolute pre-requisite (well, usually delightful. I’ve been in a few bookshops with ‘no reading’ rules. Book Nazis.) And then, on top of that, is the actual finding of beautiful things. Which is, you know, just a big ol’ bonus.