One of my first memories of when I moved to Florida was going with my wife and my mother-in-law to an antique store in the city center.
I had never seen this side of Florida before.
When I thought of Florida I always thought of the beaches in Miami and Fort Lauderdale, the space coast with Cape Canaveral, Panama City for Spring Break, Orlando with Disney, Tampa, Saint Pete, Clearwater, the major cities where you go to vacation.
Never in all my time of thinking about Florida did I think of who built, operated, who truly made it function. It was the blue-collar workers who live in the suburbs, the regular working joe who blends in the shadows completing all those mundane tasks Monday to Friday that allowed you to live your lives and have another place to vacation. This is the part of Florida I now reside in. This is the place I call home.
So, it was one of our first weekends after moving down here and we visited this antique store that was just massive. 2 floors close to the size of a football field. Just a behemoth of a structure.
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The sheer number of items they fit inside this building, shelf after shelf, row after row, stall after stall. Collectibles of all shapes and kinds. Disney memorabilia, Coca-Cola, military, old dolls, records, books, if you can think of it. It can be found here. This was a store that if this was an individual's residence American Pickers would go, visit and film an episode about it.
As I wandered around looking at anything and everything that caught my eyes, amazed at just the vastness and then one item slowly caught my attention. In one of the cases in the far back dimly lit, dusty corner, sat a small item with a simple price tag of $2.50.
A war medal.
A Global War on Terrorism dress metal to be exact, slightly faded with age. I didn't ask to see it, got no visual on if it was engraved to any one individual or not, but $2.50 was what they were asking to make it yours. I had been in the service. My time coincided with what I was currently looking at. I had been to that war. Hell, I had that medal myself. I had seen what it cost to earn that medal.
Alcoholism , jail stints, friend after friend committing suicide, failed marriages, children's birthdays missed. First steps. First words. So many holidays. So much time, irreplaceable, unrecoverable time. Now reduced down to $2.50. A novelty or a trinket somebody can put on their bookcase. There our sacrifices sat. Collecting dust for less than the price of a Redbull.