Editor's Note

The sign out front was clear enough: Antiques. But as soon as I walked in, I knew something was badly wrong.

"Hey," I said to my wife, pointing to a wood-handled ice cream scoop with a $9 price tag sitting on a kitchen table. "I had that!"

I had it, and loved it, and missed it. You pressed a lever on the handle to move a sickle-like blade inside the scoop, neatly ejecting the ball of ice cream into a cone. Why don't they make them like that anymore?

And then, on a high shelf, I noticed a rusty tin "Star Trek" lunchbox just like the one I took to school every day in sixth grade. And there was the wooden tilt maze that I had obsessed over one summer, developing an extremely high level of perfectly worthless skill at maneuvering a polished steel ball past drop holes by tilting the wooden frame with knobs on either side of the box. And, just beyond that, was one of those hypnotic Rail Twirlers, a metal loop you flipped back and forth with your hand, causing a red plastic wheel to spin up and under the loop on a magnetized axle, then up and back again, and up and back . . . for hours, until your brain turned into cookie dough. And there were my heavy wooden croquet set; the rubber galoshes with hook-and-eye fasteners that absolutely refused to fit over sneakers without a knockdown, drag-out battle; the segmented, steel-shafted golf clubs with "woods" made of actual wood; my Tad Imperial tennis racket; even the orange metal spare gas tank that came with the flat-bottomed outboards we rented on our trips to the lake and the old Coleman kerosene lamps we'd take camping.

They had my life in here. And they were calling it antique.

Then I saw the clincher. Up on a pedestal, like a museum exhibit, was a dented, rusty, nearly paintless pedal race car exactly like one I'd had from infancy -- my favorite toy of all time. The label called it a "1950s BMC Racer," and the price tag was asking $150 for this wreck. I've since seen pristine versions advertised for more than $900.

Mine was bright yellow, with snazzy detail painted in black, including a big number 8 on the rear end. It had a lever hand brake on the left side, a feature that did me absolutely no good when I decided to race down the steep driveway in front of our house, an adventure that ended in a spectacular wipeout and stitches.

It was time to leave. But I kept thinking about what I'd seen until I figured out why it made me so melancholy. The world that had created those objects and used them was just as obsolete as the things themselves. Only you could never buy it back, not for any amount of money.

Tom Shroder can be reached at shrodert@washpost.com.