It was a rather cold and dreary Saturday afternoon.  My friend and I had been rumbling up and down the back roads of Pennsylvania and lower New York making a marathon tour of every antique mall my friend knew about.  For me, typically, antiquing is a solitary occupation. I need time to take it all in. I like to let me eye peruse everything, my brain to process the information.  I’ve always been of the mindset that you simply “never know”. It doesn’t happen every day, but it happens. Some unsuspecting person picks up something in a shop and toddles it off to the Antiques Roadshow a few years later only to discover that the planter they’ve been using to house their prized mock orange tree is a rare 3rd-century B.C. Roman vase.

I’m not taking any chances. I like to take my time.

What is an antique, exactly?  Or the more pertinent question should be - what is not an antique?  Since that hallowed television institution known as The Antiques Roadshow arrived in America in 1997 the term antique has become a rather vague moniker for anything “old”.

You see it all the time.  Perhaps you think you’ll hit a few Saturday yard sales and so you go online and peruse the listings on Craigslist or some other similar site.  “Lots of Stuff Including Antiques” a headline says.  As a collector your ears prick up at the word antiques, a bit like a dog who’s just heard the rustle of his favorite bag of treats.  So you put it on your list with the other ads which have boasted having antiques and go to bed dreaming that perhaps tomorrow will be the day that you finally find that long lost Rubens laying against the wall in someone’s garage.

But the reality is almost always quite different; especially here in Las Vegas.  You turn up to the first place that advertised “lots of antiques”.  Before you’ve made five steps up the driveway you gaze past the boxes of baby clothes and clusters of unattractive furniture; all old, certainly, but not antique.  You rifle through a box of books that looks promising.  No antiques here, you think.  And so you ask.  “Your advertisement said antiques...?”  The unwitting proprietor of this ploy to get you out of bed early on Saturday cheerfully points to any number of dusty plates from the 1980s with Fred Flintstone on them, or a pile of National Geographic magazines from the early 90s that they clearly kept in the hopes that “someday” they’d be valuable.  My favorite is the “antique” that still has the price tag from Home Goods on the bottom.

Generally when this scenario happens to me I go to McDonalds, order a cheeseburger, eat it in the car on the way home, and follow it up with a nap.  C’est la vie!

I arrived in Las Vegas in May of 1996.  It was almost a hundred degrees when I finally pulled into my parents’ driveway after five days of driving across the country.  When I left Erie, Pennsylvania on Mother’s Day weekend there were still a few lingering piles of snow on the ground.  On my last morning, I stood in the freezing cold as the sun was coming up and watched my breath disappear into the air as I filled the tank of my old Mercury Grand Marquis for the last time on Pennsylvanian soil.  I didn’t know what to expect of Las Vegas back then.  I had visited for a few weeks while still at school and, naturally, was tantalized by the bright sunshine and glimmering swimming pools.  The lights on the Strip were visible then from just about anywhere in town and it was exhilarating to know that there was life going on at any hour of the day or night and just a fifteen minute car ride would put you in the middle of all the action.

But the newness of it all quickly vanished after I finally moved here, and before long I was missing my old pastime of antiquing on the weekends.  Pennsylvania is an old state, one of the oldest in the country, and Pennsylvanians tend to stay put.  A life-changing move for most Pennsylvanians would be, say, relocating from Pittsburgh to New Castle, an hour to the north of the city.  But this is what makes Pennsylvania such a great place for antiques.  Things get passed down over the generations and, sooner or later, end up in a local shop or auction.