Show won't include heavy lifting

Think of it as both a Mother’s Day present and a Father’s Day present.
At least that’s what our daughter Sally said when she gave us a pair of tickets to the Antiques Roadshow.
She’d won the tickets through some sort of online lottery; but after she won, she realized that she and her soon-to-be husband Ben don’t have much of anything old enough to be Roadshow-worthy.
Her parents, she figured, were approaching antique status by the day and would probably make better use of the tickets than she could.
That was back in May, and the Roadshow appraisers won’t be making their Midwest appearance until sometime in July.
So for the past several weeks, the two of us have been pondering what we ought to take along to Chicago.
(For those of you who have never watched it, Antiques Roadshow is a program on Public Television where people bring in old and odd items and have them appraised. Sometimes they learn Aunt Matilda’s dusty old soup tureen is worth thousands of dollars; sometimes they find out the item they paid $5,000 for at auction is a fake worth $5. The show airs at 8 p.m. Monday nights. For the record, I tend to doze off about 8:40 p.m. on Monday nights.)
The question is, other than comfortable shoes for a long day of standing around: What do we take?
That depends, we’ve decided, on what you really hope to accomplish.
If your goal is to get on national television, you take the weirdest thing possible. If you have something that might be valuable, you take that simply to find out. And if you have something you’d simply like to learn more about, that’s your choice.
So far, it’s been easier to rule things out than to make a firm decision.
No furniture. Nothing fragile.
But there are a few possibilities.
There’s a handsome old Japanese woodcut Connie inherited from her parents. We have no idea of its value and would like to know more about it.
There’s an illuminated page from the Koran, decorated in gilt and lavender, that I bought at a shop in Kazakhstan. Since it’s hanging on the wall, we’d sort of like to know what it says. (Death to the infidels?)
There’s an odd little steel egg I found at the Dry Bridge Market in Tbilisi when I was in Georgia. Take it apart and reassemble it, and the egg becomes two small cups, perfect for a toast when making friends on the road. It wasn’t expensive, but I’ve never seen another one like it.
And the list goes on and on: Gifts from missionaries to my grandparents, a war club from The Philippines that was a gift to Connie’s parents, an old wooden movement clock that’s apparently beyond repair.
You get the picture. It’s not as if we’re hoarders, but over nearly 43 years of marriage we’ve accumulated our share of stuff.
Valuable? That’s unlikely.
But each piece is interesting — to us at least — and each one comes with a story.
That’s what makes the decision on what to take so challenging.
At this point, all I know is we’re not taking anything heavy. It’s going to be a long enough day as it is.[[In-content Ad]]