15 Minutes with Alan
“All my friends thought I was nuts. They said, ‘What the hell are antiques?’”
Alan sits in the sunroom of his 212-year-old colonial house in Goshen, New York. His recliner is raised high and angled forward to make it easier for him to stand up. His knees are bad. He is a big man with a young, handsome face and a grey handlebar moustache.
——where their whale teeth, altarpieces, bronze figures, ivory, taxidermy, papier-mâché angels, ancestral portraits, Dresden ornaments, and narwhal tusks coexist. Plus, it’s nice to sit among antiques without worrying about moving any.
—Santas, angels, and Dresden ornaments, which are valuable because the Dresden factories were all destroyed in World War II. Christmas is Alan’s favorite time of year.
—
—making sure they live on.
Shane Cashman's stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Narratively, VICE, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Common, Hippocampus Magazine, and elsewhere.
shanecashman.com
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