My father loved antiques, not because they were antiques, but because they were made by craftsmen. He recognized and valued good work. He was the best person to have along with me on yard sale Saturdays. He would spot furniture that I never saw, way in the corner of the yard. (At an 'everything for free' yard sale, he saw the most valuable item there -- an old wooden trunk; it was late in the day and everyone else had missed it.) He never complained when I saw a lamp sitting on the sidewalk on trash day -- he knew he could fix it and it would be far better than any lamp you could buy in a store today.
He welcomed the pile of 'sticks' I brought to him one day -- sticks that had been sitting on the sidewalk, free for the taking. He reconstructed those sticks into their original state -- and presented me with an early handmade Massachusetts chair, circa 1795. He not only put that chair together, but had his artist friend touch up the hand painting that had been damaged on the back of that chair.
He saw value in what other people threw away, and gave me my first lessons in true recycling.
Marko Pasha remembers....As I've mentioned before, my parents collected antiques and were in the antique business, so I grew in the antique world in the '60s and '70s. Besides antiques, my father was one of the all time champion pack rats of all history. "You never know when that will be useful..." Normal people use the garage to keep the car in. Our garage housed my father's collections of everything conceivable. He always said that he was going to leave me his collection of nuts and bolts....and he did. After he passed away in 1989 in took my mother and three years of Saturdays to clear out all his stuff.
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