Antiques for Sale

The antique store was on the side of Highway 231. It looked like it had been an old filling station once.

The sign said Open. So I walked inside.

I’m a sucker for antiques. I don’t just like antiques themselves. I like the spaces where antiques have parties.

“How you today?” came the voice of the woman behind the counter. Her hair was silver. Piled atop her head. “Can’t seem to get warm in this weather. Tell you what.”

There were old heaters going. Space heaters. The kind your granny used. Heaters that leave third-degree burns on the calves of 5-year-old boys. The good kind.

I browsed their selection. I bought a book by Erma Bombeck. An old church chair.

When I went to pay, I was short on cash. “You take credit cards?” I asked.

She shrugged. “We got to call it in.”

Next, the woman brought out an old knuckle-buster credit card machine. The old machines, the ones that create an impression of your card on carbon paper. It is also an antique.

This was too good to be true.

“Bet you haven’t seen one of these in a while,” she said.

Her name was Susan. She has owned Jinright’s Hillside Antiques & Collectibles for as long as I’ve been alive. She bought the store with her husband, Benny, right after they got married.

They didn’t have two dimes to rub together. People said the store was an unwise investment.

“But we both liked antiques, so we figured, why not?”

They somehow managed to keep the lights on. Many times they kept the place running with money out of their own pockets.

“You have to have other jobs if you’re an antique store owner, otherwise you’ll starve.”

Benny was in law enforcement. Susan taught school. She was a high-school English teacher once. Then she got her master’s from U of A, and taught gifted kids.

“It’s flat hard teaching smart people. They know more’n you do. There were some days when those kids taught me.”

She’s been out of the teaching game for 20 years. She wouldn’t want to go back. Not in today’s world.

“Teachers don’t make any money no more. And there’s all sorta politics and rules you got to follow. When I was teaching, we just followed our hearts, did what we knew was right.”

As she speaks, I notice photographs Scotch-taped to her wall. A yearbook photo of a high-school girl in an evening gown. A kid in a martial arts uniform. There is a photo of former head Alabama coach, Nick Saban, who just retired last week.

“Lord,” she said. “I thought we was going to have to bury my husband when Saban retired.”

She’s lived here in Pike County her whole life. Her father was a probate judge. Her grandfather was a probate judge. Her great-grandfather was a probate judge. This place is in her DNA.

“And that’s why we’re all plum crazy.”

But she’s sweeter than Karo syrup. She’s got a unique way of speaking that is pure South Alabama. I feel so homesick I could cry.

We talked about olden days. About the winds of change. About the way the world used to be. About how life is ever-changing. And how it’s never going to go back to the way it was.

“Lord, I wish someone would’ve told me life goes so fast. One day, I’m a little girl. The next day, I look at myself, and I look like I belong in an antique store.”

Would that we could all be so beautiful.