While digging through my vast accumulation of junk and treasure, I just had an epiphany about “antique” and it’s meaning and time’s passage.

Because of the platter pictured below, I was reading up on Staffordshire pottery, and thinking, “Shit, it’s my mother’s stuff, so it can’t be from the 1800s,” when the pottery scene was kicking and people like Wedgwood and his sons were doing their thing. You know, I’m an American in the new millenium, so how the fuck could I have any reach all the way back to back in the day.

But, duh, here’s the epiphany. My mom was born in 1929, right into the Depression. Her dad served in WWI as a doughboy, circa 1914 or so, right. I knew my grandfather, and again, duh, for him to be a soldier in that war, he was born in the 1800s, right? As was my aunt Mary, who was already in her 80s when I graduated high school in 1981.

Ergo, I’m a moron. Not only is it only two generations back that I can get back a hundred years or so, but I even knew that generation. It’s pretty easy to imagine my grandfather’s parents or their families shopping for some dishes back in the hey day of the dish-making scene in the middle of the 19th century.

Hell, I even have a certificate from St. Gabriel’s Monastery in Brighton offering a prayer for the dead in perpetuity for my great grandmother starting 1/10/1924, which must have been on or around when she died. (Oh wait, the fine print has prayers for both the living and the dead, so all I know is some time some one spent $5 for perpetual membership.) So, yeah, safe to say she stretched back a bit crossing centuries.

That reminds me, I gotta give the brothers of St. Gabe’s a call and make sure they’re still at it. It does mention “perpetual” praying. Although, I guess the two loopholes are the whole chucking of purgatory and purgatorial praying in the 1960s and, of course, maybe her soul was light enough to not need that much praying to move her into heaven. Hard to say, I guess.