The Attic As A Metaphor

I'd like to think I'm a writer. I write every day. I've written news stories, shows, short stories. I've happily pounded out magazine articles. I've struggled with three novels and felt the incredible rush of emotion as I wrote those short, huge words, "The End", and meant it. But I never write as well as I'd like to. There's a touch of poetry necessary to truly write the way I'd like to and I fear I lack it.

Jenna Hammerich has it in abundance. I found her work through my work. Scrolling through a public radio website that allows freelancers to post their work, I stumbled on a piece she'd written about growing up as the child of flower children. It was perfect; hilarious, poignant and thought provoking. I not only used it in my show, I wrote her a fan letter.

She was very sweet, happy for the encouragement and immersed in her writing. She hasn't had time to put together any other shorter stories that I could use, despite my pleas. But she asked me to listen to a half hour piece she put together on the women who painted the poisonous radium dials on clocks in a small Illinois town. I did. I was floored.

Jenna has a talent for not only revealing herself, but revealing the story she's telling in a way that unfolds naturally, fully and inevitably. There is no artifice, no sign where she's placed the wires, where she's pulling the strings.

I was so in love with her work that I went looking for more. And I found it. She's written a moving tribute to Michael Jackson for Salon.

But this may be the one I like best of all so far - she wanders off to the attic of her childhood and takes us with her. She made me remember the attic in the house where my children grew up. It had a narrow, low-ceilinged stairway but opened into a high, dark space with a sunny, finished room in the front of the house. That room, with it's ancient sheet of 1930s linoleum, a small table with child-sized chairs and two shelves with doors where a child and several friends could climb in and hide, was the most magical place in a well-loved house, not only for my children but for me. I remember a few times when they were off somewhere else and I would climb those stairs and sit alone in the sunlight high above our tree-lined street, observing the world from a new and far more objective perspective.

I didn't grow up in a house with an attic. But I wandered many times into the cavernous, bat and squirrel-infested attic above my grandmother's bedrooms. There she kept boxes she never opened, the obscenely grinning teeth of piano keys without their case, steamer trunks pushed off into darkened corners that I never dared open.

That attic held a thrillingly spooky fascination for me, a feeling that our own home's unfinished attic area probably inspired in my children. It was an opportunity to test our courage with little real danger.

Ready to explore? Here's Jenna's essay about attics. Prepare to be delighted.

http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/index.php?artwork=1734

A Bit of a Bygone Era

This is a photo of a painting called The Dream Garden...done by Nathan Dolinsky of the grounds near his home in the Catskills.

I went there today. It doesn't look much like this anymore.

Imagine an enchanted cottage and gardens, tangled vines, crumbling walls and complete solitude. That would be what I found.


The house is for sale and has been for quite some time. HSO and I have dreamed about it since we first started looking for a house almost two years ago. It was way beyond our means and clearly needed a lot of work. But we kept looking for it. We just wanted to see it.

As part of my 'make this job fun' resolution, I decided to track down the house and the man who clearly loved it. It's going to make a far better story than I could ever have imagined. I found a gallery (Bantam Fine Arts, to whom I owe a thanks for this photo of The Dream Garden) and that led me to fascinating people and ideas that I think would make terrific books. Now that's fun.

I also arranged to get a tour of the house with the realtor who's listed it. HSO is ecstatic. And my daughter, who loves abandoned old houses as much as her mother does, was willing to go look for it with me today. Kind of an advance scouting trip.

HSO and I have tried in the past and failed. But I had better directions today and voila! Down a long, overgrown driveway, into a clearing we walked and I stopped in my tracks. There is magic there. The old iron gate hangs open, an invitation to explore the overgrown grounds and peek in grimy windows where carefree people in summer finery once gathered to hear concerts and sip tea. The stones in the painting lean precariously toward the ground but the ghosts of what once was still linger, whispering of happy children, adults who remembered how to play. Music and art, they say softly, were as thick there as the bees buzzing in the flowers.

I know very little about Nathan Dolinsky. But I know I would have liked him. And there's something about this house that remembers those easier times. I can't wait to get inside. More to come....