Is it Really an Antique?

Yesterday I was driving behind this truck in Rockland, Maine. To me it was just a regular ‘ole truck, but to the state of Maine it is an “antique auto” according to its license plate. As neither an auto or an antique I thought they were stretching it a bit.

Turns out the law in Maine is any car over 25 years old is an antique. Seems very hoitty toitty to call this old dodge an antique, with all the cache that the word antique implies.

Of course anything just old can be an antique. An old ratty chair, or a pair of clogs from the 1960’s as long as it is 50 years old. If it’s kinda old, it’s vintage. If it’s new and crap it’s just crap, but hold on to it long enough and it’s vintage crap and if you put it in the attic and forget about it it can become antique crap.

When I went to the auction on Monday I sat next to a man who collected ephemera, that’s paper. He bid on, and lost, a lot of widow’s insurance policies. That means at least two people wanted those papers. I wonder if the window got as much in insurance as the papers got in the auction. You know that saying, “It’s not worth the paper it’s written on…”. Well that is not the case here.

We have no idea what people in the future are going to want. But if you keep it in your attic long enough you are making antiques.

I would hasten to say that dodge truck was not even close to being vintage, let alone antique, it if the state says it is, who am I to argue? But in the future the owner’s manual might be work the more than the truck.