After years of living in rentals, and at my grandparents’, I was excited to finally be moving into our own house. Not that those other places weren’t homey. There was always a lot of love and security and freedom from strife (after early childhood). But this was a real house, constructed in 1930, and it was ours.
As if that weren’t exciting enough, I was to have the entire attic to myself, as my bedroom, which I could adorn with all my “Star Wars” and Marx Brothers paraphernalia and have my own phone and a turntable and a bookcase and a comfy chair.
Of course, it was rather late in the game. By then I was already turning 17. In a year, I’d be caught in the inexorable pull of last-minute college preparations. But time was different then, and the days were long.
Also, I tend to be a bit like chewing gum: once I get stuck on something, I’m difficult to get rid of. I may have been less than a year from high school graduation, but I would attend college only about 90 minutes away, and until I finally opened my first book shop in 1995 – the same time I was hired at WWFM, as a matter of fact, making for a seven-day work schedule – I was home as much as possible, on whatever weekends, holidays, or summer breaks I could get. So it remained “my room” for a decade or more.
After 1995, the shift was gradual but inexorable, as the space metamorphosed into more what you might expect of an attic. It became a storage space in which my parents piled up old clothing, boxes of photos, luggage, wrapping paper, household accessories, plastic bins, and bric-a-brac, much of which probably should have just been tossed. It got to the point where they were simply piling things on and around the furniture.
Now that my stepfather is in his 80s, it’s something I realize I need to address with greater industriousness. So I’ve been up a few times to retrieve some of my old belongings and to take stock of what should be bagged up and carted off. It’s an uncanny feeling to return to that space and still sense the room that once was, more or less preserved under decades of mummy dust or grown over with coral. For a room that has not really been temperature controlled for decades, it’s amazing how well-preserved are many of my toys, albums, books, magazines, comics, and films. But there are so many strata of coats and cardboard boxes and Christmas decorations. It’s a major excavation to get to anything.
Be that as it may – I realize that it sometimes takes me a while to get to the point – in the summer of ’83, 40 years ago, I was charged with the painting the house, prior to our moving everything in. Unfortunately for my folks, it was around the same time that I purchased Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian novels – you know, the ones featuring John Carter and his progeny – in the paperback editions with the Michael Whelan cover art. So I’d paint one wall, and then I’d reward myself with the reading of a chapter. Eventually, my mom started to wonder why it was taking me so long to finish the project.
In a letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul famously wrote, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Evidently, he was unfamiliar with the escapist adventures of John Carter, Tars Tarkas, and Dejah Thoris.
I am happy to say, I have always retained my appreciation for childish things, whether at 5, 10, 17, or 56. Reflecting back 40 years, on the summer of ’83, is giving me a powerful thirst for Barsoom.
