Today, I was talking with my daughter Liz about adding a Mission Oak bookshelf to a room she was redecorating. She said, “Oh, maybe I can put the new bookshelf next to the one Dad has already loaned me.” I looked at the bookshelf she referenced and said, in pure antique dealer-speak, “Oh, but the bookshelf is mid-century, and that Mission Oak piece was built in the early 1900s. I think those two styles might clash.”

Sentences like that coming out of my mouth sometimes surprise me. I have been officially selling antiques on and off for the past 40+ years, but I still don’t entirely own the knowledge I’ve acquired. This is partly because my husband Ray knows so much more than I do that I will always be the newbie in our group of two. But it’s also because since I also write and teach writing, which is where I spend most of my time, I sometimes minimize how much time I have also put into learning information in the antique world.

For example, when working with Ray and daughter Rachael in our eBay business, one of my jobs is to do deep research on the most expensive items we sell. This is partly because I love researching but mainly because Ray and Rachael handle most of the day-to-day duties required for an eBay store with over 2,000 items for sale. However, due to my time delving into obscure sites for details, I have inadvertently learned a lot about a wide range of items from vastly different eras. For example, I have spent many hours over the years learning about Native American jewelry and rugs, Gouda pottery, mid-century furniture, and American primitives. Recently, I spent several hours researching the value of an early 1900s man’s bathing suit and wrestling outfit, which we sold for a great deal more than we would have asked without that research. (Of course, that made me proud.)

My point is that sometimes, it can be easy to minimize the amount of learning that occurs when the knowledge was inadvertently acquired rather than intentionally learned out of a deeply motivated desire. Sometimes, it takes a while (at least for me) to fully incorporate that accidental knowledge into my conscious brain and “own” it. That’s what happens with antiques and me. I have learned a lot over all the years I’ve been exposed to this field, but I often don’t even realize how much I know. It’s like a gardener who has learned through trial and error how to make tomatoes grow their best. It’s only after encountering someone who doesn’t have that expertise that they realize they know a lot more than they realized.

So, today, I was the gardener, and that Mission Oak bookcase was my tomato patch.

Enough said.