People don’t save things like they used to – or at least the kinds of things you used to find in a garage or attic. At some not-so-remote point in the future, someone will ask: “What are they?”

Where I grew up, there were no basements. The crawl-space that passed for a subterranean hideaway was big enough for the rats that would periodically turn up there. Our catch-all was the attic, which was reached by a flight of stairs you pulled down from the ceiling. When you went up, you saw the bowels and innards of the house; its joints and integuments; its filters and holding-tanks. In the summer, it was so hot it took your breath away. In the winter. . .I don’t think we ever went up there in the winter. Why? Does curiosity hibernate along with everything else?

You managed a stroll down the length of the house by crouching. Overhead were rafters interspersed with nail-impregnated two-by-fours. The roof was up there – an abstract idea best appreciated from the outside.

I went up there to rifle trunks and suitcases; to browse through boxes labeled in magic marker; to pretend that I was somewhat farther away in time and space than a house-length or ceiling-panel. Not an especially avid reader, I caught up on the written word as it was offered to me by people dead and living; in story-long passages or staccato-blunt commentary. Letters will someday pass completely out of man’s memory. Here in the attic, they sprawled from beam to beam, as I devoured the sepia ink, smelled the pulp in the paper, turned away to re-orient myself to the present moment. Some of the letters were kept mysteriously. They were not, as far as I was to tell, “family.” Or at least the living family I knew.

Other artifacts were duly discovered and trotted out: a fur coat, high-school year-books, issues of movie magazines that celebrated the homely virtues and unexpected personal sacrifices of screen icons who were kept alive Saturday mornings and afternoons. The past of my own parents was in this attic – a past with which I concerned myself as a young clinician would. I grew to know, very early on, more about my parents’ lives than was probably good for me. In the process, I developed a propensity for looking in on lives that were obliquely visible, as from an odd angle or, in their cases, the more comfortable perspective of time and distance. I did not, however, find the lurid confessions that drive older children into therapy. There would be no lack of these in real life – as I would soon discover.

These caches would have suffered more precocious deterioration had they been in a garage and not an attic. In the garage I painted, books, furniture, rejected appliances, out-of-style clothing were a down-and-dirty disaster. Beat-up boxes were stacked according to the zeal - and haste – of readers who were bent on a certain genre and had to keep digging until it was found. The out-of-fashion clothes were musty-smelling and showed a natural progress from closet to rag-bag. A tipped-over sideboard leaned precariously against a sagging wall, from which square-headed nails protruded sinisterly. Abandoned birds’-nests squatted among the rafters, with a durability that was lacking in most of the other stuff. Wasps flew overhead without seeming to notice the presence, or threat, of a creature so incalculably larger than themselves.

Yet a garage is far more democratic. Anyone could enter this one and look around to his or her heart’s content. They harbor mostly junk anyway. Like as not, this junk will be hauled away in one fell swoop and dumped somewhere. Then somebody will move in and fill it up. Or scrap the garage and build something else there. Or nothing. If you’re not rich, your yard can never be big enough.