Nannaw’s Attic
Today it was required that I venture into our attic. Attics have always been fascinating to me. Because of their unfinished nature, it has always seemed to me that they express the reality of a house, free of the veneers of wallboard, or tile, or carpeting. This is what a house really looks like down deep where it lives, with the exposed rafters, the tangle of romex, the coax cables strung willy-nilly all over the place, the water pipes dripping rust and the gas pipes placed so that the homeowner will trip over them while stumbling about in the dim light from the single 60 watt bulb—itself a testimony to the unadorned honesty of how electricity really works. I was there to retrieve an empty looseleaf binder to house the one-inch thick set of course notes that Peter had sent from Dr. Collin’s class entitled “Good Science, Good Faith” and subtitled “Sonshine or Moonshine?” [I’m a real fan of Jack Collins from our days together on the PCA Creation Study committee, but that’s a whole other story.]
This was no easy task. Our attic (the upper one, not the lower one which is only slightly less cluttered) contains a highly heterogeneous mixture of our stuff and Peter’s stuff—a tribute to the fact as our youngest son he has managed to live with us the longest and thus used his parents’ attic as an alternative to Joe’s U-Rent-Um storage facility. Hope springs eternal on attic searches like the one I was about to embark upon. For instance, we are experiencing a real fork shortage at our house. We can do two, maybe three, meals without running out of forks. Where they have gone is a real mystery. Maybe, just maybe, they made their way through some inadvertent process into this attic where I will come across them while looking for something else. ( I almost always find something I wasn’t looking for but desperately need when conducting an attic search like this one.) Sure enough, as I searched one unmarked box I came across not just forks, but 6 entire place settings of flatware: knives, spoons and the much needed forks. But then I realized that this was a Peter box, and apparently these were utensils he had purchased in college, and was now storing against the day he might need them, say, on the mission field, or (perish the thought) if he should marry some day and needed a starter set. Glumly, I placed them back in the box, still eyeing the coveted forks for a possible long term loan. But I knew that Susan would quickly spot them as having a different pattern and would send me back here with my tail between my legs. I could hear her saying, “Now John Dishman” (she always calls me by my full name because of what her sister did when she was 16, but I don’t have space to go into that now) “those are Peter’s and you put them back right now.”
As I resumed my search I suddenly fell into one of those states of reliving the past which seem to become more common as one ages. (Before you jump to conclusions, I haven’t had that many of them….) In my mind I was taken back several decades to when I was a teenager visiting my grandmother (my mother’s mother) in the small town of Collinsville, Texas, about 60 miles north of Dallas. On that occasion I had reason to venture into her attic on a similar mission to today’s. Nannaw [that’s what we called her. Why I don’t know except probably because my oldest cousin, Beverly June, named her that before I came along—undoubtedly as she combined “grandma” and “nana”. Not only did Beverly name this grandmother “Nannaw”, but she managed to name her other grandmother (who also lived in Collinsville) “Nannaw” as well and was always confusing me because she would call our Nannaw “Nannaw Flanery” and her other Nannaw “Nannaw Goldie”. At least on my father’s side they had the good sense to name that grandmother (who also lived in Collinsville) “Granny” which led to less confusion even though both my grandmothers lived in the same town (don’t all grandmothers live in the same town?)] had a house that to me was like a monument to our family. We lived in rented houses during my childhood, but Nannaw owned her house. My other grandmother’s house was much larger, but by the time I came along the Dishmans had leased it out to renters so I never had much reason to go there. But every summer I would spend several weeks, even months, at Nannaw’s house. As a child her house seemed to me to be big (even though it wasn’t), and it was on two acres of property (right next to the cemetery) and even had a “tank” on it. ( I never could understand why they called a pond a “tank”. When I got older I found out about “stock tanks” and began to understand their motivation driven by the economic interest of maintaining their livestock.) Though I pictured the house to be big, even I at that age realized it wasn’t fancy. For example, because the soil in Collinsville is pure sand (which made for great times for a little boy in the natural sandbox that surrounded the house) the house had settled causing the dinning room floor to have a slope in it. You walked downhill in going from the living room to the kitchen through the dining room. Then there was the matter of hot water. She didn’t have any. It seems that one day she gave away her hot water heater to the preacher, who needed one more than she did. So we always took baths at her place by heating this huge teapot on the kitchen stove and then toting it to the bathroom tub. She was still taking baths this way at age 95!
As much as I had explored Nannaw’s house and the surrounding property—including even the cemetery with its own monuments to our family and the other families of Collinsville—one place I had never ventured was the attic. First of all it was never clear how you would even get into the attic. And secondly, there was never a real need to do so. But then one day something—I don’t remember what—started acting up with her television. And the antenna wires seemed to disappear into the attic. And “Eureka” I happened to spy a subtle marking that I had never seen before in the ceiling of her huge front porch. It was an entrance to the attic! In a flash, I was back with the ladder, climbing up to the portal, and after struggling mightily managed to push open the ceiling-matching wooden door that blocked my way. After retrieving the flashlight, I poked my head through the hole and surveyed Nannaw’s attic.
A feeling came over me that must have been similar to the first European explorers who entered the burial vault interior to the great pyramids of Egypt. A dust cloud, driven by the disturbance of the door, swirled about along with that musty odor that connotes great age. Immediately in front of me were some old jelly jars that someone had long forgotten about, intending to use them some day in the annual canning ritual that Nannaw performed as she made plum jelly from the fruits on the tree in the front yard. Beyond the jars was a network of wires the likes of which I had never seen before. Bare copper wires ran from joist to joist, pausing at each one to be wound around white porcelain insulators. It began to dawn on me that this must have been the way Thomas Edison had electrified the first cities: bare wires with just enough insulators wherever they came close to something that could catch fire, like the ceiling joists! By now I had spotted the TV antenna wire running along a 2-by-6, but it was a lost cause. Climbing into that attic would be like jumping onto the rails of the NYC subway. Totally deflated, I turned out the flashlight, replaced the door and climbed slowly down. Later we were to get Nannaw a brand new TV and a better antenna. But on that day the thrill of victory had turned to the agony of defeat.
Back in my own attic, I came to and found the sought after binders in a box of Susan’s tutoring materials. At least this attic experience had been more successful than that one long ago. Yet, I was reminded of a haunting similarity. In February 1980, just as the USA Olympic hockey team was winning its gold medal, Nannaw died. She died at age 95 after a full and healthy life. The cause of death was listed as……..ovarian cancer.