Chapter 2: The continuing saga of "An Antiques Addict"

I grew up in a lower middle-income household. My father was a U.S. Veteran of WWII, and my mother was a holocaust survivor who immigrated to the States with nothing. If she had the choice of buying a vase or vegetables ... hey, don't laugh ... you try eating a vase when you're hungry.

Subsequently, our house (tenement apartment, actually), save a few "made in Japan" porcelain tchatchkes, was devoid of decoration (the food, however, was plentiful ... and good). So, later in life, even though I could already afford nice things, my own home continued to be pretty austere as far as decoration goes. Come to think of it, it was pretty austere as far as food goes as well, because I've always hated cooking. Anyway, "antiques" was something that rich people had.

But it didn't take me long to plunge headlong into the realm of antiques. Using almost everything I earned as a copywriter, and armed with a computer and an ebay ID, I started buying anything that looked "old" and interesting. I bought so much stuff online, that I can, to this day, proudly say that my house is decorated in "early ebay." My daughter, who was, by then, getting used to seeing only the back of me, said that my name, translated into Latin, would undoubtedly translate to "ebayus addictus."

I stopped this drunken spree when a seasoned dealer advised me that "old" doesn't necessary mean good. "Buy it for the quality, not the age," she said. "They made junk 100 years ago too." In time, and with the help of friends and my quickly-growing library of reference books, I was able to recognize quality.

Stay tuned for Chapter 3 in the continuing saga of "An Antiques Addict"