We all have things we put off doing. We put them off for a few hours, a few days, a few weeks …
My wife and I put off cleaning our attic for 35 years.
There were good reasons for this. Its contents were conveniently out of the way, happily out of mind. The attic is frostbite cold in the winter, hotter than the hubs of hell in the summer.
It’s also hard to get to. A new attic ladder, installed to make it easier, actually made it harder. The new ladder is narrow, poorly designed, precarious. There was no way we could climb it without risking a fall.
Still, it was time. It had been so long since we put most of the things in the attic after building the house that we’d forgotten most of what was up there. We could have left the job for the kids to do after we’re gone, but we’d rather have them remember us without grimacing. The stuff had to be taken down and dealt with before any more years passed.
Even If I could climb the ladder without coming to a hard landing on the concrete floor and potentially a trip to the E.R, I’m getting too old to be tottering around in the dark on the tops of ceiling joists. Someone young and strong would be needed to bring the stuff down. We were only too happy to hire a friend’s grandsons. It took them half a day to finish.
We had no idea what treasures were lurking in those dimly lit recesses, entombed in decades of dust.
Some of what the boys brought down was junk. Some was destined for the Good Will. And some were reminders of times long ago, experiences all but forgotten.
One of the oldest was a flier for a St. Patrick’s Day dance with “Live Music by the Playboys.” The Playboys were my first band. Its leader was Ron Shannon, son of the late Velma Morrison. I’d have been about 15 then. The dance was in the Cascade High School gym. I have absolutely no memory of it.
Another relic from the hoary past was a Civil Defense Preparedness card. Its instructions included, among other things, warnings to equip your family shelter with a two-week supply of “food, water, first aid kit and battery radio.”
This was what we lived with in those days. Paranoia about the Russians bombing us was rampant. People dug shelters in their back yards. A community shelter in the Highlands exists to this day. Happily, it was often used as a dance hall, never as a refuge from a nuclear attack.
Four Bogus Basin ski lift tickets recalled teenage winters when skiing was an obsession. I skied every weekend, every day of the Christmas break.
Multiple receipts from the Orange Grove Drum and Guitar Shop were early evidence of a lifelong obsession. Two, both from 1969 and both for $150, were for guitars – a Fender Telecaster and a Gibson Les Paul. Either, in pristine condition, would be worth four to five figures now.
Four Boise Aviation, Inc., receipts were for flying lessons. I was 20 years old and besotted with the idea of becoming a dashing airline pilot. Jet jockeys returning from Vietnam dashed that hope by getting virtually all the jobs. All I got was a private pilot’s license.
Some documents change our lives. Documents like the torn and faded one ordering me to report to the U.S. Naval Training Center in San Diego and from there to the U.S. Naval Base in Charleston, S.C. for further assignment to the Naval Communications Training Center in Pensacola, Fla.
The orders on that tattered piece of paper would take me from my lifelong Idaho home to a new life as a low-level spy in faraway places. The last would be Germany, to intercept radio transmissions of the Polish, East German and Russian navies.
The attic’s keepsakes were many and varied. There were pictures of old friends, old girlfriends, a newspaper clipping with a photo of a friend who made a cello in his high school woodworking class. He went on to play bass with Paul Revere and the Raiders.
The oddest item? The Official 1984 Price Guide to Beer Cans.
No, as a matter of fact, I have no idea why it was up there.
Most of these things were in lacquered wooden boxes. The smaller of the two had “Jazzmaster $” carved on the lid and had once contained savings for my first good guitar. My parents made up the difference between the savings and the price of the guitar and surprised me with it on Christmas morning. It’s still one of the best Christmas gifts I’ve ever received.
The larger box had strips of paper with names of minerals in a youthful scrawl taped to the bottom – gold, iron ore, turquoise, crystal … My father and I collected them from abandoned mines in the town of his birth, Cripple Creek, Colo. I’d have been seven or eight at the time.
A banker’s box contained scores of my old columns; another box was filled with letters. Letters from my parents when I was in the Navy. Letters from my wife when we were newlyweds and she was spending a semester student teaching in Washington state.
The oddments from the attic spoke of many chapters – a young boy exploring with his father, a teenager in a rock group, a student pilot, a sailor, a journalist …
Sometimes, in down moments, we feel as if we haven’t done much with the time we’re given. It can take a revelatory experience, perhaps something as mundane as cleaning out an attic, to make us realize how full our lives have been.
Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.
Tim Woodward 