Dunkirk NY – When it comes to writing, I am always of two minds. The first is that I feel I have something to say, and writing it down will help clear it up. The second is that I have nothing to say, and writing it down really won’t make a damn bit of difference. So I tend to dawdle, getting the urge to write, and then suppressing that urge. It leads to less posting. But I’ve been cleaning my attic the last four days in anticipation of insulating it, and so perhaps this post will be the mental part of that, purging the attic of my mind (with apologies to the Grateful Dead).
What they do now when they insulate an attic is put down a layer of some sort of foam right on the floor that fills in cracks and such. Apparently they don’t use the old fiberglass batting along the ceiling, which was what I had been thinking would happen. The stuff, once it’s on the floor, seems to make the attic unusable, as I presume you can’t walk on it. That’s a loss, not so much for me, but for whoever gets the house next, as it’s a lot of space to lose. For me, getting rid of all the stuff in there means I won’t really need the attic anymore, as I doubt I will be collecting enough stuff to fill it. A small storage space can be set aside, so we will do that, but otherwise it’s served its purpose. At the very least the kids won’t have to clean it out.
Purging an attic is purging memories, purging the past. About 85% of the stuff I had up there was books. You can’t get rid of books anymore. Nobody wants them, and especially nobody wants theatre books. I have all of Tony’s books there as well, but his collection is more history-related (Civil War and WW2), and there’s a little more of a demand for those. My kids each had an area, but there is really nothing much that they want saved. Their approach to their own past is different, I suppose. Since none of them truly have careers yet, there’s not much to save from work achievements. They don’t read books, nor really collect much of anything. My daughter has her stuffed animals, my middle son has a collection of role-playing gear, and my youngest son has baseball cards, but they do not seem all that eager to have it all. None of them really have a place for storage anyway, so it’s all been there since they moved out. Will they change their minds in 25 years? Who knows.
I have some old writings and memorabilia from high school and college and from all my teaching jobs. Right now I am merely getting stuff to other rooms in the house, not so much culling and purging. That comes later. But as you clean, you always find something that makes you stop and pause a moment: a letter from a former student, a review from a show, a Playbill, photos buried deep in a file drawer. I am not sure I know the value of these things anymore.
It seems we live now in a culture where preservation is not the norm. I get the distinct feeling that younger people today do not have an awareness of the past. They seem to believe that their lives are made only in the moment. And yet, they seem to document everything. They have little hesitation to put their lives on the internet through social media. They have cameras in their pockets at all times, and I am not sure what they do with all this digital recording of their everyday lives. Do they preserve all these selfies? All these GoPro adventures? I think to a certain extent we documented our lives as well, but the analog equivalent seems more tangible and in some ways more lasting. What’s really amusing to contemplate is that I think I can digitize my life down to the point where it will fit on a 128GB SD card.
I ran across both the journals that my wife and I kept on our great cross-country trip on 1976. There are, however, few photos. I spent one winter digitizing my father’s slide collection of our life as a family. I have some VHS tapes as well that he had made from his 16mm home movies. I have to send those out to be digitized again. Yet, as I face all this personal history, I continue to question the value of preserving it. Who will view it? Will it ever make a difference to anyone? What will be its value in 100 years? Is it really worth the time, effort and expense? Who will even keep it over the years? Will that 128GB SD card vanish into the bottom of some drawer, only to be thrown out in someone else’s attic purge?
My parents were not terribly interested in family history. There are a collection of old photos somewhere among what my father left behind, but on the whole my parents never talked very much about their past or their families or their experiences growing up. My mom remembers things here and there, but getting her to talk now it difficult due to her dementia. My mother’s sister has delved a little into the genealogy of the family. My father became somewhat more chatty late in his life, and one of my nieces made some secret recordings of him using her phone, but I’ve not heard them. So I do not really come from a family that preserved its own history.
So I think I am taking the “just in case” approach. Just in case someone wants to know. Just in case someone becomes interested. Just in case it becomes meaningful to someone later in their life. I never much cared about knowing more about my family until I turned 60 and came to the awareness that my parents wouldn’t be around forever. In a sense I am trying to forestall that for my own children, but I think they are much more aware of my and my wife’s past that I ever was of my own parents. Getting the attic cleared out is much more than just a matter of throwing out 30-year-old garbage and records. It’s also a matter of placing your life in some sort of perspective so that you can pass that down to your children, always with the understanding that, in the grand scheme of existence, it carries little meaning. -twl