Attraction and Albatrosses

You are helpless before your attractions. Whether the Earth or a gnat, you must approach your desires, and as you do so, you change them, and are changed by them.

We moved from a duplex to a single family home with a great back yard: split level deck and leafy back yard on the shore of a tiny duck pond in the midst of the city. Best of both worlds.

We couldn't start moving, however, until I had cleared out an attic filled with books. REALLY filled with books...seventy boxes, probably close to 2000 books. The attic had been struck by disaster: an immigrant roofing team had shoveled the roof shingles off without noticing that the plank roof has inch to two inch gaps open to the attic beneath. They filled the attic with dark, dry powder and greasy pitch shards, chunks of sharp asphalt and nails. They covered the books.

The boxes had all been opened prior to our going on vacation. I was going to create a database and enter the whole library, maybe sell some on the net. We came home and the landlord mentioned that the roofers had dropped shingles in the garage on Sara's year old Saturn. I immediately thought of the attic, and rushed up to find the mess there. It took several lawyers, insurance investigators and various unidentified flying gumshoes nine months to reach a settlement with me. In the meantime, not trusting anyone, I left the scene completely untouched, in case new rounds of skeptical settlers had to parade through the evidence and did not believe the digital photos I had collected. Of course, the settlement came a scant month before the move began, and I could only work on weekend mornings, by and large, due to the intense heat of the attic after 10 am or so and my work schedule.

Sara tried to help the first few days, but the sight of me wandering in a grim fog among the wrack and flotsam that had been my book collection was too much for her. She stayed at the ready, but stayed downstairs, knowing that I had to find some entry point to the trauma that I could use to collect, connect, reclaim.

After a few days, I finally imagined a staging area by a dormer window. I vacuumed a spot free of debris and the kind of volcanic drift that covered every square inch. I wondered if the people living near Mt. St. Helens or Vesuvius had similar feelings of loathing for the scene of their respective aftermaths.

My first step was to contact a local bookseller. Mary was in her twenties, and had worked in PR for a while before opening a neighborhood shop across the lake from us. She came over after I had a weekend to do some preliminary sorting, and was surprised to find a number of good classics and mid-list novels and non fiction in the boxes I set aside for her. She offered a few dollars a box, and carted off about 400 books in the course of an hour one hot morning. I felt positive about the disaster for the first time, because I had to come to terms with getting rid and getting over, and she had been enthusiastic about her "discoveries." I could have done better with a little more work sorting and checking at half.com or the equivalent source of buyer info on the web, but I was happy to see her get a break in her new business, and I was happy to see some books start to leave the dismal attic.

The books were an albatross around my neck. . And more than books, there were many boxes of bills and records from the divorce and after, souveniers of the many trips I had taken with the boys, photos and letters from various girlfriends I had between the divorce and remarriage. It was the scene of a symbolic murder, in a tangible and richly sense-laden way. A hell of memories and unresolved stuff, clinging to me, weighing me down, drowning me in the dense air of fears and postponed resignations.