Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Day Trips

Day Trips

Since Linda retired I have to get her out of the House… She has a “Cray” computer for a brain (Think of it as a bank of IBM servers and mine as a hand held calculator). I might not be smart as she is but I am smart enough to put her in the driver’s seat and find places some distance away to visit. Usually it’s a day trip and whenever we visit an antique shop I pick up a fistful of brochures and when she asks later as she invariably does, “What are we going to do today?” I reply… “There’s a great antique shop in West Puppy Breath, Wisconsin that I have been dying to see all my life….It is an antique Mecca, you’ll love it”

To which she replies, “What a wonderful idea, we can do this, this, and this along the way,” and I nod affirmatively.

Anyway yesterday we took one of these trips and it was an education in “Quality.” I have a theory that in every antique shop, regardless of how run down and picked over there is hidden, amid the array of objects, an item of real quality. It is like a scavenger hunt going inside and trying to find that one treasure. It is a testimony of faith to suspend all disbelief, self-interest and prejudice and free float searching for that elusive pearl. You get to spend several hours treading about in a sea of moldy and disarrayed displays. I tell my students to do this in their exploratory writing. (They don’t listen but I keep repeating myself.)

Yesterday I found my quality object in a locked glass case filled with toys….That’s right toys… and while my preference is always porcelain this figure was plastic…that’s right a child’s toy. It was an action figure… standing tall, amid all the junk surrounding her…, an Amazon, who looked like something that came in the box along with a ”War Quest” video game. It was dated 2002 and the workmanship was exquisite… It was made in China if you can believe that…” I bought it for $10.00.

The artist that fabricated (created?) the original was a force who would have been right at home working for Meissen. The features were crisp and sharp and the paint was still dazzling despite being covered with filth.