toys in the attic
the things we hold on to, the things we've lost, the memories that remain
My parents’ attic used to be a treasure trove of nostalgia. Everything my sisters and I didn’t take when we moved out was up there; school notebooks, albums from the 70s and 80s, ancient board games, hockey jerseys, graduation gowns, old textbooks, my sister’s Cabbage Patch doll. Then one day the attic was just cleaned out. My father got tired of having to maneuver through his kids’ memories when he needed something from the attic and unbeknownst to us, he discarded the artifacts of our youth (I’ve since forgiven him).
I know it’s silly to want to hang on to your seventh grade math notebook that had nothing of value in it except for a few doodles in the margin that were mostly riffs on “I hate math” but I’d still like to have it to thumb through and reminisce about Sister Mary Jean and her love for algebra. I wish I had my old Genesis albums, or the 45s I collected as a kid, or that Toronto Maple Leafs jersey I got for Christmas one year because even though I am an Islanders fan I developed a crush on Rick Vaive in the 80s.
“Why do you want to hang onto that stuff?” my father asked when I confronted him. I didn’t answer him because “for nostalgia’s sake” probably wasn’t a good enough answer as to why all these things I had an affection for were sitting in a dark, dusty attic where I never looked at them. It was only when they were gone that I ached for those records and notebooks.
I’m a keepsake kind of person. I like to have mementos of events that loomed large in my life, or even small things that brought me joy. I own a piece of an armrest from the last Islander’s regular season game at the Nassau Coliseum. I wrote the date and seat number and the score of the game on it and it sits on a shelf, along with a couple of childhood books, a Polaroid camera, other detritus of my life. I have a box stuffed with my children’s artwork from elementary school, a journal I started for my daughter when she was an infant, yellowing pictures, report cards. I don’t know what I’ll do with this stuff besides take it out once in a while when I’m having a fit of nostalgia and cry over it all. Yet I hang on to these things as if they are an amulet against aging, that as long as I have these things from my youth, from my kids’ childhoods, I can somehow keep the past piled onto the present and live in both times at once.
I think about the things I got rid of myself. The boxes of baseball cards I had no room for when I moved into my first apartment. The Star Wars and Pokemon toys I passed on to strangers at a garage sale when we sold the house on Wellington Road. The video game consoles, the DVDs, the CDs. All of those artifacts of my life are gone and while I wish I had them all I know realistically that I have no room for them, and that they would only serve to make me feel wistful constantly, upset that I can’t go back to a time when I played Super Mario Brothers with my youngest sister and we just gaped in awe at the amazing graphics and gameplay.
Life was simpler then, and I think all the keepsakes I have and the ones I no longer have exist to make me acutely miss those times when I didn’t have a mortgage and a failing body, where I wasn’t sixty years old. As I feel the past slip away from me, as time moves on and the memories aren’t as clear, I do wish I had some of those notebooks and albums and video games to keep me company on my ride into my later years, to remind me of when life was only as hard as the next level on Legend of Zelda.
I have started buying albums to replace the ones I bought in the 70s that are no longer in my possession, or the import records I bought when I worked at Record World, which I sold to pay the rent in the late 90s. I do have some of my old, dusty vinyl and every time I play Genesis’ Trick of the Tail or REM’s Reckoning I’m taken back to the very days when they were new to me, when I was young and believed that youth lasted forever if you wanted it to. I don’t want to really return to those times, but I do want to preserve them.
I think about my attic items often, about how awesome it would be to have all those memories as tangible objects. I think about the things I threw out in a fit of rage like old cards and letters from exes, or the things I thought I had no use for anymore, but I do now. The older I get, the more I have the need to walk myself through my past. The more difficult life gets, the more I want to hold my past in my hands just to make me feel once again like everything is ok, like I’m not slowly marching toward old age, like the past holds the secrets to the present.
The older I get, the more I try to balance the growing desire to de-clutter with the nostalgic feeling I get when I see some of stuff I've accumulated over the years. Strange feeling.