Getting Intimate With the Subject Matter - and the Object of Affection as Both a Writer and Antiquarian - But Always With A Heartfelt Sense of Providence

Birch Hollow Photo by Suzanne Currie

      For someone who has long confided in the public, without shame, seeking readers' validation of my wild array of intimate stories, you'd think I'd have also included a little note here and there, explaining why I believe this has been important to me.  In regards, of course, to my bold willingness to share so many personal and family stories of past exploits, (some that are pretty crazy) via thousands of published newspaper and magazine columns over the decades, and through the electronic media, particularly blogs like this one. In person, you see, I'm rather standoffish as I have always been, due to a lifelong relationship with shyness. I was born this way and I've always found ways around addressing a group discussion, and avoiding at all costs, public speaking of which I am terrified and it always shows if and when I can't avoid the main stage and a glistening "live" microphone. So I have instead, for these many years, preferred to use the print media and then electronic, including a former radio spot I used to have on CHAY FM in Barrie. But what is not known of me, either as a present antique collector and dealer, a journeyman writer, and regional historian, is what I find most difficult to even write about, is what I once contended with as a reporter which did put my psyche in harm's way. It's still difficult to discuss even with family, so you can imagine that it is much harder to address in this public forum. But the importance to my biography, which, after all, was why I commenced this blog in the first place, is that the intimacy issue of my involvement in antiques and all that it represents, (ghosts included) and my interests in local history, are woven tightly into how I matured in all aspects of what I decided upon as chosen professions. It began simple enough.

     After a year of struggle trying to keep our first-effort antique shop in operation, in the former home and office of Dr. Peter McGibbon, on upper Manitoba Street, across from the stately Norway Maples bordering Memorial Park, in Bracebridge, I needed to take a job to bulk up resources. Sales were terrible that first two years, and yes, it was the reason we had to close it fifty years prematurely. I had planned it as my own eventual retirement business, which it has become, but not with the name Old Mill Antiques. To infuse some extra cash, and seeing as my mother Merle took over the day to day operation of the shop, I was afforded the opportunity to work with the local print media. I had just recently graduated a university level creative writing course, and graduated with a degree in Canadian history, but I wasn't in any way up to speed on news reporting and copy writing. And I certainly wasn't a photographer. But that had to change and I had no choice but to adapt to my new assignment in life, because the shop was bleeding money and I couldn't afford to replenish our inventory. So when it came to the responsibilities of being basically the only reporter on the local beat, for a tiny newspaper, I really didn't have much choice. I certainly couldn't turn down an assignment, of for example, chasing the municipal fire trucks and ambulances on a call down the highway.

     On my first accident call, on Highway 69 at what is known as the "S" curve, I had no idea, and I mean this, what I was going to find at the scene, and just how close this cub reporter was going to get to ground zero of human carnage. I can remember the first responders who saw my identification as belonging to the "Press" allowing me to pass along the metal and gas strewn roadway to within feet of the totally collapsed and smoking sedan that had collided with a fully loaded tractor trailer that was straddling the centre line. I was there taking a huge whack of photographs while the fire fighters were deploying the jaws of life, in an attempt to free the driver. He was the sole occupant of the vehicle. There was a surreal atmosphere to the scene, with a grey and yellow chemical haze, and as I was trying to breathe and focus the camera, there came such a blood curdling scream, that I nearly dropped the camera to the ground, and very nearly fainted in a succession of events that snapped me back to reality. This was going to be a death scene, because the man they were trying to rescue did not survive the trip to the hospital once rescued from the wreckage. The truck driver fared better as you might expect. I was wobble-kneed for the rest of that work day, and I very much disliked the editor for sending me on this assignment to get a front page photo and story based, unfortunately, on my own actuality at the scene.

     Where have you heard this before. I needed the money. I wanted to be good at the job, and I wanted to be as tough, resilient and courageous as the first responders, and be able to handle these tragic news events with rigid efficiency and responsible coverage based on that old media norm of "the public's right to know." So what it meant for most of a decade in the news business, locally, is that I attended far too many tragic situations on the roads and at house and building fires, and indeed, I notched quite a significant number of front page credits, and seeing as the pay was poor, the bylines were part of the salary package. They would help news staffers build their personal portfolios, should the daily publications come calling.

     The reason I want to explain this period of my work chronology, is to allow readers of this post, to appreciate that when I write about sensory perception, and use the words "spirit" and "ghosts" like they're toothpicks after a fine meal, there is a relevance of intimacy here, where I do find that I have developed, quite without intending so, an elevated sense of insight about many aspects of both writing, and living and working with possessions that once belong to someone who has crossed over to their heavenly reward. The fact that I had a reporter's access to death and its aftermath, in the professional sense of covering the local news, the trauma I never truly dealt with, on an emotional level, turns up routinely in the present tense of dealing with heirloom and personal pieces from estates we acquire through a wide variety of sources and opportunities. I look at my role in this profession much differently now, than when, for example, I began collecting antiques and then opened my first shop. I confess that at this point I was pretty much in it for the money, and hustled like a man obsessed, to be the first at sales, the biggest spender at auctions, and the sharpest when it came to what we call "horse trading" amongst associate dealers trying to out perform the competition. When Suzanne and I opened Birch Hollow Antiques in 1986, in the living room of our Ontario Street home, in Bracebridge, I was clearly not in the same mind-set as when I began buying and selling old furnishings. I soon began delving into print antiquities, from books to ephemera, being of course "old paper."

     It was a gradual shift into a more intimate relationship with antiquity on one hand, and a more profound relationship with the family biographies that came along with acquiring what amounted to personal letters, diaries, journals, and documents that I wasn't really supposed to see, let alone sell off in our shop. It's difficult to explain but handling profoundly intimate and personal correspondence, like attending accident scenes as a cub reporter, gave me access to information that often seemed a fundamental breach of privacy for remaining family members. But often, and I should make this clear, Suzanne and I were often the only remaining mortals interested in these personal declarations, love letters, confessionals, diaries that were seriously revealing, backed up by photographs that we probably should have destroyed before even examining them closely. But our archivist bent disallows us to be this casual about the information contained within, that can be very relevant to historical record on a wider scale than the family circle. Which by the way, often has ceased to be an issue, as kin have all passed away.

     In the coming few posts, I would like to explain a little bit more, how Suzanne and I both have handled some of these sensitive matters in the past, and even in current affairs, and how deeply we can become imbedded in very personal family chronicles, painstakingly handling the paper trail of often more than a century; and coming to know the chroniclers very intimately at the end of our research effort. For how ever long we work on cataloguing a collection of ephemera, and old photographs, we become part of that family as a confidant; and we are the deciders as to what can be revealed and what must never be released to the general public, because of the damage some revelations could cause the community or neighborhood.

     Please join me for a close look at what our role in the antique enterprise has become in this retiring period of Birch Hollow Antiques, and what we have come to appreciate of its broader intimacies.