Sweeping out the attic

Every time I have moved, it has caused panic. Wait, that's not entirely true; between the ages of 22 and 30 I must have moved 10 times, and that was not so big a deal, except that each time I seemed to have doubled the amount of stuff I'd acquired. But once I actually started feeling happy about who I was and where I was--once, that is, I quit work, moved to the city, and started grad school--I found that I stopped wanting to move. Moving didn't just mean getting a bigger apartment or a new roommate, it started meaning something more like ripping up the plan and starting over. It happens despite everything--despite all that Peter Pan stuff about not growing up, ever, about not wanting to "settle" the way our parents all "settled." The thing is, when you like where you are, leaving holds less appeal. Even when you're leaving for something that looks pretty good--who knows? There are no promises. You could be making a dreadful mistake. You could fuck it all up and never get it back the way it was when it was good, but you left. That happened to my friend M. when she was courted by a newspaper in Detroit--God, they begged her to work there--but it was some sort of mean trick, I don't know, she finally took the job but wehn she got there all those people who begged her to come to Detroit acted like they hated her guts, gave her a chair that didn't even swivel, stuck her at a desk in a back corner and dropped by twice a day to yell at her. In New York she had known famous people. Now she was thinking about becoming a physician's assistant and living in a cream-colored brick house among brick houses on a street among many streets in a suburb among many suburbs of a city that no one goes near if they can help it. It was as if she was dropped into a bubble of despair and turned into a speck in it and disappeared. I saw the panic on her face, last I saw her. They'd started her on some mood-bracing meds but they hadn't kicked in yet. She was drowning. Well so when my parents decided to move, it was with good reason--they need to live somewhere safer for them as they were getting older and having trouble getting around, climbing stairs and such. It's all good, really. But pulling up anchor on that hulking ship of our house, which I grew up in with my brother and where they had lived forty years: that was a massive job, and like a tidal wave, bound to come back at us later once the seismic shifting work of cleaning the place out was done. They'd lived there 40 years. They had saved every single scrap of Christmas wrapping paper any of us had ever peeled off a gift--they made us unwrap slowly and then fold the paper up and put it in a box and the boxes went up to the attic for safekeeping and re-use. The attic was full to the rafters with Christmas paper and similarly saved useless things, but, that was the life my parents lived: The just-in-case life. The maybe-we'll-need-it-someday life. And someday had come and gone and the ball of string had only grown larger, the boxes heaped up higher, the carpet scraps grown heavier and riper with mildew, none of it used. I had to go dig them out. And I knew as I did this that the emotional impact of heaving out a houseload of stuff saved for the someday that never came, this revelation of the passing of our lives, it was definitely going to hit me hard, later. I've known others who went through it and they assured me it would suck. But for most of the fall, all I could think of was my poor parents, drowning in all this stuff they still didn't have the ... the... guts? nerve? heart? the sense to throw out. I had to go help them. I didn't want to but I had to. Somebody had to. It was a pretty big house and they could barely climb the stairs. So everything I had to toss out for them, for all of us, (my baby blanket, wedding gifts that mom had not really ever taken out of the boxes, candles half-burned at Thanksgiving dinner 1974, 57 gallons of slightly used house paint, old suitcases full of heirlooms my mother had saved and had no one but me to give them to, the electric frying pan she cooked nearly all our meals in, when we were all a family, and the spices in the kitchen that were maybe 53 years old) the fact that all of this was chalking up a mark on some deeply held internal anxiety scorecard in my gut--that was something I'd just have to think about later, when the work was done.