The Day It Rained Indoors

Sunday night, I finally threw them in the dumpster.

It was a stack of books, coated with a film of sickly grey dust . . . mold that had been growing for more than two years. I had held on to them this long because, on the one hand, I needed to check which pieces of my collection were a dead loss so I could adjust my records, and on the other, I wasn’t eager to face the task. So they had stayed in storage until I could get around to it.

This unpleasantness goes back to late August 2009. I had lost my job the month before and was in the process of applying for unemployment benefits and looking for temp work.

And then our storage closet, on the top floor of the apartment building -- the seventh floor, mind you -- suffered a leak. The HVAC system for the supermarket on the ground floor broke down and leaked water into the roof, which seeped through the concrete and onto my stored boxes of books, photo albums, papers, compact discs, and videos.

You can see in this first photo how the moisture dripped down from the ceiling on the very top of a high stack of boxes, and smeared the label “Photos” on the top one on its way down to others below. It wasn’t a flood, per se, but for mostly paper goods, it was enough, particularly since the cardboard absorbed the water and held it so it had plenty of time to seep into the contents of each box.

In itself, the disaster was tough to take, but its timing was another punch in the ribs. In just a few days I was committed to leave on an expensive, packaged vacation Carole and I had planned for months. I had only a couple days to try to dry out my valuables, get some sense of the damage, put it all away somehow, and pack up and go (and trust that my stuff in the closet would not get rained on again when I was away and could do nothing about it!).

For the few days I had remaining, I pulled all the wet goods out and spread them along the end of the seventh floor hallway. (This photo does not depict all of it, by a long shot; you’re not seeing a lot of other books, the photo albums that took on water so that the prints stuck together face-to-face, my CDs, and my scrapbooks, about which you’ll hear in a moment, I took down to the apartment for special attention). Particularly damp music books and clothbound novels enjoyed a special place on the windowsill for the hot August sunshine.

The building manager assured me he would press the supermarket and its insurer to reimburse me for the damages if I could come up with a figure. That could wait until after my vacation was completed. Something extra special to look forward to when I got back home, along with drawing unemployment and job hunting, eh?

Fast forward to mid September. Many of the recent editions were easy to price. But many items were more challenging. What is a Leonard Nimoy autograph worth, especially in a program for his performance in a one-man show about Vincent Van Gogh, in which Nimoy played the painter’s brother Theo? Prying open the stuck pages resulted in tearing damage to the booklet.

And the poster for the movie of “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” which Ray Bradbury had autographed with a personalized note to me more than 26 years before? A friend claimed he had seen an eBay listing or something that suggested it might be worth several thousand dollars to the right buyer, but that would have been before the paper got wrinkled from water damage, and why would I want to get rid of a poster addressed to me in any case?

As far as I could tell, my rock-and-roll, jazz, folk, and classical CDs would still be playable once the moisture had evaporated out of the jewel cases; it was just the wrinkling of the paper insets that made them look awful. How to evaluate those? As angry as I was about what the corporation’s poor maintenance had done to me, I didn’t exactly feel right about asking them to pay me the full value of several hundred audio disks.

Some of the ugliest damage occurred to my scrapbooks. Over the years I had put newspaper and poster publicity, my published writings, concert tickets, and news stories about events I had experienced and shows attended in big books like artist portfolios. I had mounted the clippings on black construction paper between clear Mylar sheets with just a touch of rubber cement to hold them in place.

Where the water got in, the black of the construction paper bled all over my clippings and stained them almost to unreadability. The page at the upper left in this photo is supposed to be as bright as the one to the right of it, if not the very bottom right edge of the sheet at the bottom of this photo.

Although they had little or no intrinsic value, these losses were in many cases the most irreplaceable. I couldn’t begin to figure out how to put a value on them. The portfolios, when ordered empty from an art supply company in Boston known as Charette (where I bought the first ones, because that’s where I was living back in the early 1980s) have cost something like $110 or $120 apiece in recent years. That’s before I put anything in them. You can see in the photo below how the water that had gone all the way through a scrapbook portfolio from top to bottom left a black “footprint” of it on the concrete floor beneath.

This kind of incident forces you to consider seriously your attachment to things, because you have to let some of them go. Roger Ebert, in chapter 27 of his memoir, Life Itself, one of the last books I read in 2011, says his home is filled from top to bottom with books because he’s never been able to give any of them up.

Why do we hang onto books and magazines when so many of them are readily obtainable at a library? Are they emotionally valuable in themselves, as sensual objects with weight and appearance and smells all their own, or isn’t it the intellectual content, the knowledge, that truly matters?

How important are photographs of your youth and travels abroad? How valuable is the evidence of things you created in the distant past? When it comes down to it, aren’t your person, your memories, and the relationships you sustain with other people through life all that truly matters as you make your way from birth to death?

Well, yes, but. . . .

[To be continued]