attic antics

The grandeur of Tanner Manor belied our humble lifestyle, but we were rich in some ways. Because Mom and Dad trusted us, they gave us a very long leash to play and discover things on our own, making us rich in freedom. We didn’t have to go much further than the walls and halls of our own home to find adventures. Consequently, no nook or cranny of Tanner Manor went unexplored. ​

​Take our full-length attic, for example. More than the typical, dusty repository of old things, the attic in Tanner Manor served as our gymnasium, play room, and hideout where we could safely escape the din of the house. Just before I was born, a house fire ravaged the attic necessitating the family to move out for six months while the insurance company made good on the claim. According to Mom, the cleanup gave the old place a fresh upgrade. What kind of shape the attic was in pre-conflagration is a mystery, but it did get a fresh coat of silver paint. (Why silver is a mystery to me!) Nonetheless, the wood floor had no insulation and the rafters were left exposed and rough.
 
Up onto those rafters we hoisted an old baby-crib mattress to create a loft with a lookout. When we tired of that, we threw the mattress on the floor below to catch our falls for when we turned the rafters into monkey bars. The mattress also served as a gymnastic mat for our handsprings, somersaults and flips. But, best of all, it became our “sled” for descending the attic stairs to the third level. Whooping and hollering all the way down, then doing it over and over again, my siblings and I made lots of noise. “Where was you mom, and how did she react to such a racket?” a girlfriend once asked. At first, I didn’t have an answer. I’d never even wondered if our rumpus bothered Mom. Later, it came to me: one of the best things about Mom (and Dad) was the freedom they allowed us to be children and to express all our emotions—both happy and sad—and some of my happiest, carefree memories include riding atop that mattress (or tucking inside thick, old sleeping bags) and sliding repeatedly down the hard, uncarpeted attic stairs. On Sundays, we weren’t allowed to play outside with neighborhood friends, but our parents recognized we had an abundance of pent-up energy from sitting in church for hours. So, along with our raucous Sunday-night games of black tag, attic antics ranked high on the list of approved Sunday activities.
 
Over the years of having multiple children perform in school plays and church roadshows, the folks accumulated a large assortment of costumes, mostly handmade, that were stuffed into an old trunk at one far end of the attic. By the time I came along, Mom had had it with sewing on her unreliable machine, so I have no memories of her sewing any Halloween costumes for me. This suited me fine because I never much liked fantasy or make-believe stuff anyway. Instead, for my Halloween ensembles, I’d race up to the attic about an hour or so before trick-or-treating and pull out random pieces of costumes from the trunk, literally throwing something together for the night’s fun.
 
Not all our fun was inside the attic, though. The attic was also our passageway to some high adventures outside Tanner Manor on top of its Spanish-tile roof. Climbing out the windows on the south side, we perched ourselves on the roof three stories off the ground, and, on rare days when the smog level dropped and the view was clear, we could see all the way to Long Beach. Sometimes, we would stay up all night in the attic just to watch the sun rise over the greater Los Angeles area. I don’t remember pulling that kind of attic all-nighters very often, but when I did, I could count on feeling sick and tired the next day.
 
Even when we weren’t taking in the spectacular view, we thrilled in daring each other to walk around on the roof. Occasionally, as we gingerly tiptoed across the slanted ridges, we would crack a tile or break one that would slide off and crash to the ground. Dad would grumble at us, of course. However, I’ve since wondered if the broken tiles frustrated him less because we were on the roof and more because he wasn’t a fixer, and he knew the broken or missing tiles would leave the roof exposed indefinitely.