Once Upon a Time . . .

I’ve probably been in every antique store in L.A. County from Palmdale to Long Beach, but it wasn’t until the other day that I realized why: I was searching for my past.

I am not often stricken with such philosophical notions, but I guess an awareness of millennia had wiggled into my subconscious like a worm in an apple, making me think about time and yesterday.

My reason for haunting antique stores in the first place, I hesitate to say, was not to seek my core-person but to search for old or unusual martini glasses, the likes of which play a small but feral role in my past.

I have a collection of glasses intended for the most celebrated of all drinks dating back to the 1930s. The shape is almost always the same, though the style and color vary from tall, elegant cobalt blues to short, gleaming, workaday reds.

I even stopped by Sotheby’s Auction House in Beverly Hills to stare longingly at a display of 11 martini glasses once owned by George Burns--vessels whose contents had helped the gentle comedian live to be 100.

They were somewhat ordinary glasses, but because they’d been his they eventually sold for $747, which is a lot more than I’ll pay for just about any kind of drinking container.

My wife, Cinelli, who used to call me Two-Martini Martinez, now wishes I’d find something less, well, drunken to collect and I did try angels for awhile, but it’s martinis, not angels, that more properly define my character.

I never have been in the company of angels, but I’ve been friends with about 10,000 martinis.

*

Anyhow, I was in a place called the Encino Antique Center looking for martini glasses when I came across a funny little windup bird that created a flash of memory among the shadows of the long ago.

It was a multicolored tin bird about three inches high with a key in its belly and a faded patina of time overlaying its metallic feathers. The store owners had wisely kept it in a locked case so guys like me couldn’t wind it to death, but it didn’t matter.

I knew from memory that if the bird had been wound it would walk stiff-legged across the floor, its frightened black dots of eyes staring ahead like something out of a Stephen King novel.

I’d been given a bird like that once when I was younger than I ever remember being, though, as I think about it, I do get a quick glimpse of a small boy sitting on the floor, watching the bird clickety-clicking its way across a memory-room.

Benjamin Franklin said that time is the stuff that life is made of, but you can play with that phrase a little to say that life is the stuff that time is made of too. Living fills the limits of time and keeps its own record on scrolls of memory, good and bad.

Seeing that bird made me see other relics of my past until I was consciously searching not for martini glasses but for myself, a kid that crawled from the womb in a storm into a world of mottled sunlight.

*

I found the kind of old kerosene lamp we once used to light our house during the Depression because we had no electricity. I found the kind of Rawlings football I’d bought by selling Liberty magazines door to door.

I found a glass from the 1939 World’s Fair at Treasure Island, a Kodak Brownie, a battered old Remington typewriter, a wrought iron floor lamp, a Rockefeller-For-President campaign button, a bird cage, a Ronson table lighter shaped like a magic lantern, an old Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

I was at that fair, we took pictures of our babies with a Brownie, I began writing on a Remington, I sat under that floor lamp, I covered that campaign, I had a bird in that cage, I lit cigarettes with that lighter, I wrote for that magazine.

They were all pieces of my life, each in their own period, and I read the scrolls of their memories with a mixture of joy, nostalgia and regret. Time comes and goes like a thunderclap and there is no getting it back. Only its echo remains.

This was supposed to be a sort of traditional end-of-the-year column, not a litany to my past, but it got away from me. Essays are like that sometimes. They write themselves, the way an incoming tide seeks its own level.

I just wanted you to be aware, I guess, that as you stride toward the new millennium there are things about the past you might want to remember, if only for a moment, like a bird that clickety-clicks across a room or a martini glass you raised when youth was a song and time was a thunderclap.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.