Flea market booth

I didn’t always appreciate my mom’s antiques and collectible habit, which started when she was in her late 30s for reasons I’ll never know, much less understand.

Her hobby led to a job clerking at an antique shop owned by a trio of hippie dudes. Not too many years later, around 1980, she had her own space in another shop, Ye Olde Cupboard, which after a few years, she ended up owning outright until 2014.

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I was indifferent to her collecting at first. I thought my dad’s running was kind of cool, but antiques? I didn’t know what to make of brass lamps and corner cupboards, Saturday Evening Posts and Depression glass. She, like many antique and collectible vendors, was a collector, too. The stuff came into the house faster than it left.

Indifference moved toward resentment as I entered junior high and felt mortified anyone should see the inside of my home.

But what was kind of neat were the colorful people that came along with the antiques and collectibles world of Miami. Her first bosses, the hippieish dudes, would come over on weekends to drink beers, smoke cigarettes and watch “Saturday Night Live” with my parents. My sisters and I were allowed to stay up and inhale second-hand smoke. I always fell asleep while it was on, but I still got a glimpse of Chevy Chase, John Belushi and Gilda Radner in their primes.

That shop and crew dissolved, but they were just the first of many antiques-world characters to come into our lives. I don’t know to what extent eBay might play a role now, but the thing about collecting back then was people had to hunt in person, and we often attended flea markets and collectibles shows with mom as she sought to keep things coming in. And a lot of others were regulars who’d similarly stop in Ye Olde Cupboard to see what new inventory she might have.

There was Ben, who was a teenager only a year older than my older sister when he started coming around.

He was into jewelry and, according to one of my sisters, ‘50s paraphernalia. He ended up becoming a family friend, but really my mom’s friend, and remained a helpful presence in her life after my sisters and I wandered away from Miami in our 20s, and my dad died in 2010 and she inched toward incipient old age, but damned if she didn’t keep that store open until 2014, when she was 75.

Ben I met, of course, but other regulars I knew only by my mom’s shorthand. Coca-Cola Tom, who collected you can probably guess. Marge the cop, who was one. Eleanor, who was in veterinary medicine and worked at some point for some very rich folks who owned a sort of private zoo. We got to visit it once. My dad got too close to a cage with a few chimps in it, and a chimpanzee grabbed my dad’s arm through a cage and I watched as they played tug of war over my dad’s arm. He later said he was lucky, that the chimp had just decided to let go. My sister reminded me about another shop regular who owned a palm tree nursery and dated someone who’d been a parrot smuggler.

Other than holding on to too many skateboards, I’m not a collector. I’m more likely to take stuff to Goodwill than leave with stuff from Goodwill. I’m not what you’d call neat, but I don’t like clutter, and I like to think the things I’ve loved I carry around on the inside. I don’t need them on my wall. Maybe it’s PTSD from my upbringing.

We didn’t use the word hoarder back then, but my mom was often and accurately described as a packrat. We had a garage and whole rooms full of antiques and boxes of stuff. She’d sometimes blame the scarcity of The Depression, which always cracked me up because she was born in October 1938, when it was almost over.

Mom had a baffling brain. She didn’t have any kind of sorting system — ha, you’d get the joke if you’d seen the layers of clutter — yet when she knew of a customer who wanted an item, she could unearth exactly what she was looking for amid the messes.

Though junior high was tough for me from a social perspective, by senior high I stopped caring what other people thought, and that’s when the fun began. I developed an addiction of my own, skateboarding, which was synonymous with punk rock in those days. The skateboarders I fell in with were not judgmental, unless you liked Ronald Reagan or dressed preppy.

My eventual girlfriends recognized that the piles of stuff were my mom’s problem, not mine, so that was a relief. For the most part, everyone who came over enjoyed looking through the stuff. Sometimes Mom would just tell people to go ahead and take something they had their eye on.

Maybe I took something from it, too: I may not collect anything but wrinkles from age and scars from skateboarding, but I can appreciate others’ fondness for the hunt. From my now-safe remove, I can see the joy in collecting, how there’s something therapeutic in hunting down the thing you need to complete a set, or maybe even feel a little more complete.

Whatever my mom was hunting for all those years, I hope she found it.