Excavating Towerlawn Drive, part 2

Continuing from the August 30 post:

II.

What remains of Nineveh, that great city? Or of Babylon, the biblically reviled? Wikipedia, that venerable, and unassailable source says [see Nineveh/archeology]:

In 1847 the young British adventurer Sir Austen Henry Layard explored the ruins. In the Kuyunjik mound Layard rediscovered in 1849 the lost palace of Sennacherib with its 71 rooms and colossal bas-reliefs. He also unearthed the palace and famous library of Ashurbanipal with 22,000 cuneiform clay tablets. The study of the archaeology of Nineveh reveals the wealth and glory of ancient Assyria under kings such as Esarhaddon (681–669 BC) and Ashurbanipal (669–626 BC).

The work of exploration was carried on by George Smith, Hormuzd Rassam, and others, and a vast treasury of specimens of Assyria was incrementally exhumed for European museums. Palace after palace was discovered, with their decorations and their sculptured slabs, revealing the life and manners of this ancient people, their arts of war and peace, the forms of their religion, the style of their architecture, and the magnificence of their monarchs.

A squall of rain was whipping the car as we turned onto my parents’ street. In the whining gusts I could hear ghosts howling: “why have you come to loot this tomb?”

Nancy read my troubled thoughts. She reminded me, “when we go in there, we’ll be confronting your parents and your past in every detail. But remember, we’re here to clear out the debris...” I stopped listening to her, as other voices intervened. “... to recover the core artifacts, and put them on display in a temporary exhibit....”

I had to acknowledge, the ghosts were right on that one. We had come to clean, unclutter, reorder, and depersonalize fifty years of, shall we say ‘eclectic,’ accumulating, for the sake of putting the house on the market to sell. Yes indeed, a ‘temporary exhibit.’

My parents had lived in this house since 1958. In the course of those years my sister and I survived the inanity of the local public schools, escaped to college, and then came and went hundreds of times for holidays, birthdays, deaths, and weddings, but even more often for R&R, to seek forgiveness, or to renew our connections. In those comings and goings we saw a large portion of the house gutted by fire in 1975 and then rebuilt, and at least twice we watched my father’s business become enormously successful only to crumble through his fingers. Like wrestlers my parents bent the full force of their lives against the horns of the economic beast to create a place and a name for themselves. This house was full of the artifacts and gashes of those battles and campaigns.

I was now about to enter the ruins of Nineveh’s treasuries, full of the loot, the literature, the accounting records, the court proceedings, the garbage and detritus etched into the brick, pressed into the once-soft clay, painted on the walls, hung in the corridors, and ground into the hardwood, slate, and concrete floors.

Had this been a treasure hunt or a house-makeover reality show, the emotions of the story would have followed one of a few standard scripts. However, the back story, my parents lives, cast weird, disturbing, and unpredictable shadows everywhere. Here were artifacts fraught with meaning, but of those we ultimately saved, few conjured up an image of my father or reminded me of an experience with my mother. The loving moments, the screaming arguments, the subtle encouragements, the crude demands and manipulations, the laughter, frustration, incompleteness, when we were done, all was missing or existed in a universe tangent or one degree of separation removed from tangent. It filled the house and yet was not there.

We pulled into the driveway, rain overflowing the gutters. We had no key for the weighty, creaking front door. Legend infers there never was one. Our house was always just open when we were kids, and then when we began to drive, my parents installed an electric garage door opener, the first on our block, by damn, with a zapper, so that’s how we got in. Now there was a code box by the garage door, but the car still had its zapper and the old door slowly groaned and rose. And thus we descended into the ancient past.

Ghosts of bygone ages: battles, assassinations, treaties and expropriations, jealousies and defeats, borders drawn and violated, years of growth and abundance, eras of loneliness and tears. All this lay in the damp and musty garage air. What awaited us, not twenty feet away: layers of dust, and objects sunken in their places for the immemorial moments that extend like a thousand years.

I unbent myself from the car, careful not to step in the grease patch left from all of my mother’s cars. That grease had to go: the grease that leaked out of the two-tone ’56 Olds 88, what a bomb, and the ’60 Cutlass station wagon – first year Olds made a Cutlass – and a real bona fide lemon that was, and the red ’66 Cutlass coupe – I blew the engine off its mounts, twice no less, by trying to see how far I could peel tire, revving the engine with the brakes full on till I popped them. My dad must have known what I was doing, but he never said a word. He just clucked his tongue a couple of times, called the tow truck, paid the bills. Then there was the ’76 puke-tope Cutlass coupe they gave to Nancy and me when we agreed to move back to Pittsburgh, so I could work in the company; the ’83 Cutlass wagon and its look-alike, the ’94 clunker we had picked up at Aunt Gert’s 20 minutes before and were just getting out of. All of them had dripped their essential fluids on that particular patch of history to be expunged from our garage.