Antiques Gavin Moore `

Antiques

I’m standing. No, I’m sitting in a kitchen full of antiques.The kitchen is deserted this evening, except for me and two elderly people—antiques. One is loading the dishes or maybe they are taking something warm out of the oven. There should be other people here, but right now it’s just me: I don’t even know why. I stand at the very center of the room; there is an air of liveliness around the kitchen, even with just the three of us. I can still envision the stories I was told here in the kitchen by my Grandpa, though they probably have not been told in a while. This makes the stories, just like the people telling them, antiques—a rare item only appreciated through age.

I listen to a story of my grandfather’s time in Ireland, recently shaken by the effects of two World Wars. In that kitchen, I hear stories of climbing over the brick wall, into the monastery courtyard, to steal apples from the monastery’s tree. He and his friends would scramble back over, chased by the passing gatekeeper. I look at this man who has gone through so much. He says that,one day he had returned home from school to find his family cat nailed to a post on the street. Grandpa says he hates whoever had done that. He never found out.

As the clock goes on, more family fills around to hear his stories. Even those who had already heard them, presubambly many times, would sit—nodding their head at each anecdote. He moves past the stories of childhood and into his teens. One story sticks in my mind: the story of rolling cigarettes from the butts he found on the street to sell for cash. So bold and rebellious, I am in awe. Illegal at the time, but in a desperate act to survive, my grandpa would quickly bend down to snatch any butts left on the ground, pouring out the stuff out then getting paper and rolling it back up inside. 46

I listen in one chair or another; there is never a bad place to hear a story, soaking everything in. It is amazing that one person could have gone through these trials and tribulations, like something out of a fantasy book. The house is covered with old plates and dishes, but none of them can tell stories like that. These stories are real; they were experienced. All the hard times, crazy experiences, or thrilling acts. They are the stories worth telling and the stories I am told, over and over again.

The stories go on, people disperse, until once again it is just us three in the kitchen: Gramma, Grandpa, and I. I look at my Grandparents, wondering how they got to this point, shuffling around the kitchen like friendly roombas. I look to see a kitchen filled with tiny planters, and in them, even tinier cat statues, long stained glass window charms distorting the view outside, and a Christmas tree, still not taken down since winter. It’s almost spring.

My Grandfather’s stories seem fake. Not untrue, but unreal. They are stories from another time—antiques, rare, precious, to be held onto as long as possible. Antiques are something left with a family, carried on, and like a good story, told from one person to another.