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What’s thrown in the attic, stays in the attic
There are reasons why I haven't moved away for nearly a half century. The most important is I love Lake Parsippany. We've looked at bigger, more modern houses, but instead of a beautiful lake at the end of the street, there has always been just another row of big modern houses.
There's another reason, some presence above that holds me here. No, it's not a heavenly mandate. It's my attic, my bulging, overloaded attic. I know if we sold the house I'd have to empty it because the incoming family would certainly want the space to store their useless stuff.
When we first moved in, the attic was almost inaccessible. There was a small trap door in the hall ceiling. If you wanted to put something in the attic you had to stand on a wobbly step ladder, slide the trap door to the side and hurl the item into the dark abyss. I should have left it that way. Very few things were being thrown up there because they became almost irretrievable.
Then I installed one of those pull-down attic ladders, a rather terrifying experience. At one point during the project 75 percent of me was in the attic while the other 25 percent, my right leg, had penetrated the hall ceiling and must have looked like a really weird chandelier.
The new easy route to the attic was just too much of a temptation to keep things that should have been thrown out.
”Just for now” was the usual phrase before lugging an old bowling ball or a hi-fi into the upper reaches. Eventually, my four kids, who were as reckless at collecting as I was, moved out leaving their many boxes of miscellany behind. They'll never retrieve them. I'm sure their own attics are full to the brim by now.
If I did decide to get rid of the junk, I'd have it done by a disinterested professional. Turning it into a family project just wouldn't work. Every item would have to be studied and its history and disposition debated. “Oh look, my old cheerleading jacket! I wonder if it still fits.” and “Here's my third-place swimming trophy! There's hardly any rust.”
And so it would go on for hours - reading old diaries and passing around the ukulele and the tambourine and hugging tattered Teddy Bears and Raggedy Anns.
No, we'll just let it be and hope that someday the bowling ball and the hi-fi don't come crashing down on us. Then on some far distant date (I hope) the family will all be sitting around the living room and someone will ask, “So what are we going to do with Dad's ashes?” And someone else will make a suggestion and they'll all agree, “Well, just for now.”
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