Part of That World

“Have you checked out Adella’s hideout lately?” Pop Pop asks in the quiet of the early morning. We are recovering from the day before, a long and busy Sunday with the kids.

Adella has adopted the bottom of an upstairs closet as her official hiding place. No doubt she discovered that I had reorganized the narrow, tall, linen closet on the second floor while playing hide n’ seek. The space once occupied by several of Uncle Daniel’s boxes is now vacant. Practically an invitation for Adella to move right in.

Now there is enough space underneath the bottom shelf for both five-year-old Adella and two-and-a-half-year-old Marshall to comfortably play and hide. An ideal hiding spot for hide n’ seek. An even better one for a clubhouse. Less crowded than the coat closet and a floor with fewer pokey wire hangers than the floor of our clothes closets. 

“I found my alarm clock up there. That closet hideout looks a bit like the cavern where Ariel keeps all her dinglehoppers.”

Pop Pop is particular: he has spent years finding his perfect alarm clock--a 2-inch square, battery-operated, analog clock with illuminated numbers and an alarm that cannot be ignored. Pop Pop is frustrated that his perfect alarm clock migrates throughout the house. Its small size, easily grasped by small hands, and its ticking second hand are particularly attractive to all three grandchildren. 

I go upstairs. Is my linen closet really filled with gadgets and gizmos aplenty? It’s not that I do not believe Pop Pop. It’s just that he frequently exaggerates. 

I open the door. I look down. 

A comfy bed pillow, an accent pillow, my faux Pashima scarf, a tiny red teddy bear with green antlers, a sock monkey, and a handful of animal crackers. Hardly what I would consider whosits and whatsits galore.

And then I look up.

On the lowest shelf amidst the pillow shams and sheets for single beds, there is an empty, gray, clamshell eyeglasses case, a dictation tape recorder, a handheld cassette recorder, a 4 X 6 picture frame, and Pop Pop’s red alarm clock. The second lowest shelf, just out of Marshall’s reach, is more heavily laden: an empty Game Gear carrying case, a Fisher-Price pocket camera, a set of plastic baby keys, a white plastic skull key chain, a black folding Radio Shack travel alarm clock, a silver souvenir state bell with Utah on the handle, my Japanese word book--a small spiral flip notepad filled with neatly copied vocabulary words from my days in a Japanese immersion school in 1980, a Quidditch manual, a pocket-sized copy of Suess-isms: Wise and Witty Prescriptions for Living from the Good Doctor, a 1996 Chromium Gold Beetleborg Metallix Medallion, a wooden top, a broken wallet-sized calculator, a functioning scientific calculator, a clear container with a golf ball and Mr. Potato head ear and nose, and a pink plastic sand bucket with a broken yellow handle containing ten unsharpened snowflake pencils, a folded brush, two pieces of a broken Rubix Cube, and 2002 holiday teddy mini Beanie Baby. Could she have reached the next highest shelf, no doubt, Adella would have decorated those shelves as well.

All Adella’s thingamabobs are neatly arranged. Pop Pop is right: Adella’s treasure trove does indeed resemble Ariel’s. Not in sheer volume, but in its randomness. It is a motley collection of items for which she has no use. Even the pencils, with which she could draw, are unsharpened. She does not know the purposes or functions of most of her treasures untold. She has collected these items simply because the colors, shapes and sizes of each appeal to her sensibilities. Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe she knows something I do not and is stockpiling these items for very particular uses in a coming zombie apocalypse.

I look at this collection, and I laugh. Delightedly, at her sheer chutzpah--appropriating Pop Pop’s and my things without a second thought. But also nervously, for I hope I am not witnessing the early stages of kleptomania. After all, her mother Chrissy had very sticky fingers at this same age, stealing a Barbie bridal veil on a playdate, Tic Tacs from discount store Bradlees and a rubber stamp from the craft store Treasure Island.  Worse yet, I wonder if Adella’s collecting is not the first step towards her becoming a star on the reality series Hoarders. Perhaps an intervention is in order. Regardless, I hope she tells no one how much time she spends shut in her grandmother’s closet. I do not want the Department of Child and Family Services to open up a case file on me. 

By Monday afternoon, Adella and Marshall are back playing at my house once more. Adella emerges from the closet after Round One of  “Dinosaurs”--our little game in which I am a dinosaur (T-Rex, I think) chasing my prey, two hapless, screaming children, through the house. Their hideout saved them from my ravenous appetite.

“Hey, Granma,” Adella says. “Who took my clock?” She has clearly noticed the one missing item in her trove.

“You mean the red one?” I say. “It’s Pop Pop’s. He took it because he needs it.” 

Pop Pop has wisely put his reclaimed little red alarm clock on top of our high dresser. It is safe for now. At least until Adella pushes a chair up to the dresser to restake her claim to it.

“I need it," she says. "How will I know what time it is?” 

I do not point out that there is a second alarm clock, digital no less, on the second shelf. Instead, I say, “One problem at a time, my dear. We’ll handle that problem when you know how to tell time.”