Atticus

How should a guy react to digging out his only baby rattle from the family archives of junk, lovingly dumped into some random box under a supersized table?

I live at home now…home being a matchbox sized 1BHK, with a miraculous balcony. A home currently occupied by 5 people, so space needs to be fought for. And I’d waged a war against the balcony…throwing away everything we didn’t need…and dumping into more boxes, the stuff we apparently did.

And we happen to be a family of hopeless stashers, so the aforementioned task…is a huge one. Boxes and cabinets and cupboards are brimming with the arcane and the useless….relics of the 3 generations that called it home. Stuff from work, school, the children, the grandparents, the Gulf, the malluland, the weddings and the funerals. Just stuff, man….Monica would have an orgasm just listing the categories they could be organized into.

My dad has this thing for restoring ancient electronics. He’d bring stuff from the office that’s probably been discarded after 3 lifetimes of use, and tinker away until it got running again. It used to drive Mom mad at times….we’d have the most massive of audio systems (one entire cake sized box for the radio, another such box for the tape recorder, and even another for the amplifier). Stuff with dials for indicators…and knobs for everything else. Crackly sound and horrible reception too, but those things never were the point. And this museum also had sections for the ancient wood paneled TVs, the 286s PCs, and dinky air heaters with exposed red hot copper coiling.

Some of those have made their way here. Add to that a cornucopia of nursing manuals (Mom), draughtsman’s instruments (Uncle), banking newsletters, Old Spice shaving kits and ornate lighters (Grandpa,), an assortment of textbooks used and handed over by the grandkids here, and the (Tom & Jerry / wildlife/wrestling) cassettes, and discarded / recycled toys left here by the dozen odd grandkids…and it’s a bewildering personal museum…that balcony.

And it’s here that I’ve now dug up my beloved rattle, my swaddling cloth, the earliest family photos (Dad must have been 14 in some), the sexy little gold lighters, my grandmother’s wedding sari…and a plastic pouch containing too many openers to belong to a family of teetotalers. And there’s still a ton to sift through. My new daily habit.

It started off as a dumping drive…so that I could fit in a hammock, a bitching PC, some very phancy speakers, a book rack a lamp & a bed. Nothing too ambitious. Now I’ve got frigging sentimentality tooth marks all over my heiney.

Current music: Window in the skies, U2.