I often think about the attic room where I lived as a teenager in my family’s house on Krick Street in Norfolk, Virginia, during the 1960s. A long room under a sloping roof, cut off by a stairway and a door from the rest of the family, it was a world of its own, almost the artist’s garret of my imagination.
All through high school I hung out there with my friends, who would stay sometimes for a weekend or a week. My parents never knew who was eating supper or breakfast with us until they showed up at the table. Now that I think back on it, I realize what a gift it was that they never complained or made any of my friends feel unwelcome.
We were used to people living with us, often relatives who needed time away from their own families. In those days my grandmother and my younger cousin May Ann lived with us for long periods. We always seemed to have cousins dropping in for a few months while something that had gone wrong in their lives was being worked out. One friend lived with us for a year while his parents did a tour of duty for the army in Europe.
There was a heat register in the floor of the attic that allowed warm air and voices to drift up from the hallway. If someone called me I could hear them, but mostly they were just fuzzy, familiar tones that comforted and connected me to the life below. My attic room was like the cabin of a ship that was sailing somewhere altogether different from the rest of the house. We were teenagers traveling to another country.
I had a stereo and a collection of records that included most of the early Bob Dylan, and also Simon and Garfunkle, and the Beatles up through “Magical Mystery Tour,” and the Fifth Dimension. The music was the background of our lives, and our emotions resonated with the music. We were Simon and Garfunkle walking on frosted fields of juniper and lamplight. Or the Fifth Dimension, driving a car past Rosekrans Boulevard. The songs purified and objectified those powerful feelings we didn’t know how to deal with – love and loneliness, self doubt and idealism.
My father had built a writing desk in the alcove of the room, and I could sit there and look down on Krick Street in the snow and imagine the poetry I was writing had something in common with the poetry I read in books. When a poem was finished, I would pin it with a tack to the wall behind me until I grew tired of it and another one took its place.
The room was filled with books, mostly inexpensive paperbacks with gaudy covers that lay around on tabletops and makeshift bookshelves. We read science fiction magazines with names such as Galaxy and If and Astounding. The best of them, Ed Ferman’s Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, published the new, literary writers we were falling in love with – Delaney and Zelazny and Ellison, names that still evoke a sense of awe and wonder.
It seemed like everyone smoked in those days, and we were not exceptions. Cigarette smoke drifted across the ceiling and out the open windows, and we tossed the butts out the window and into the bushes where my father would come across them in the spring. Today, walking into a room filled with cigarette smoke makes me ill, but we had become acclimated to the toxic air, like gilled creatures swimming in the methane fog of Neptune. We were teenagers, heedless and reckless, sure that we would either live forever or die young, and it didn’t really matter which one.
My friends and I are still on a ship going to another country, but not the same one as in that attic room when we were young. Now we are middle-aged and our children are growing up or grown. By now you’d think we would have found some settled place, a harbor, but we are still sailing blind through unfamiliar oceans where faint voices call us.
Love this writing. I so wish my children and grandchildren were able to have more times like these: times of self-exploration and contemplation and comfort in this world where so many of us are still sailing blind. Thanks for writing this.
I was there! I heard the voices, smelled the smoke, and felt the security of living with parents who t invited family and friends to join us. “Stay for dinner. We can just put another potato in the pot.” Then, quietly to my brothers and me, “FHB!” (family hold back). And the miracle of the fishes and loaves was re-enacted at our dining room table!
Once again, you have reminded me of those wonderful days when we had forever to live and learn, the universe was limitless, and people were kinder to one another. I have to believe that there are still places like this somewhere!
Thank you for writing it, Walt.
Excellent. I could see that attic room and hear those “fuzzy, familiar tones.” I particularly enjoyed the reference to the “gilled creatures swimming in the methane fog of Neptune” – very evocative, very creative! As always, well done.