(Still life with ladies hats from the back downstairs bedroom amid innovative storage systems of several eras, both metal and plastic. Crap. Photo Socotra.)

I agree with you- the episode yesterday was an uplifting prelude to the final send off. I felt good. the day was bright, though a cirrus clouds began to wave tendrils across the sky as the morning went on. I had been dealing mostly with the main floor, the domain of Big Mama and her airy library and the white carpet and the view of the glittering waters of the Bay. There was something else lingering, though, and that was the Raven Cave, his sanctuary and refuge.

My father, intimate and real, suspended like an electric clock with the plug pulled firmly from the outlet on the wall.

Once it had been a place of work for him, an place to get organized and think. Files of the Wire Company he owned, the contents of several offices he had occupied down through the years. Then, the plastic containers he used to “get organized” as he began to fill them with identical contents: office supplies, post-its, pens, and a notebook of things “To Do,” none with more than a single notation, most of the latter ones with nothing at all.

I spent a weekend in that office on one trip, toting containers up the stairs and hurling them into the garage. There was still more, though I could not imagine that it was much. The road home, soon, I thought.

Rick was up visiting, and said after church he would carry up the small amount that remained down in the lower apartment. The garage was virtually empty. Life was good. On the road, soon, I thought with satisfaction.

Rick made fifteen or twenty trips up from the Raven Cave on the lower level. Gawd, back to square one. His files, his correspondence. His endless series of plastic boxes containing pens and pencils. Gadgets from other decades, the like of which have not been seen on a store shelf in a generation. Some objects familiar, like the little reel-to-reel tape recorder he used in the 1960s. Others outré and curious in purpose.

(A sample of Raven Wreckage. Innovative storage systems, pouches, and office equipment are featured here. It is all the same. Photo Socotra.)

Things from the boat, things from the cabin. Underwater film cameras. Another high-end Polaroid Land Camera for which film is not longer made. Things.

It began to pile up as Rick shuttled and we feverishly sorted through paper and gadget, innovative plastic container system by system. A rock polisher. A broken telescope. A rock polisher? I sighed. All this has to at least be looked at, or else an act of desperation is called for. And the dumpster is full.

Crap.

I groaned. This was not going to be a simple run to the storage company. The dumpster was full and nothing more could go on top of the pile.

This has real implications:  a full-up trip to the Transfer Station, plus a trip to the Goodwill, and the Storage company today. Damn, damn, double damn.

Looking at the piles, I thought it was entirely possible that I could slip into a double dip depression. Pam came up from Down Below, and said: “You know the bathroom is still filled with stuff, don’t you?”

“No,” I said. “I really had no idea.”

(Time stopped down below in Raven’s Cave. Photo Socotra.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com