No, like it or not—not—it was off to the attic for me.

Luckily, I had been through almost half of the boxes already. I had stopped when I found the package. My goal now was to go through the rest of them, even if I discovered something early on. I didn't ever want to find out later that if I had kept looking, I would have found something vital. I started up where I had left off.

As I worked my way through the boxes, I couldn't help wondering why my father had hidden the package the way he did. But the fact that he had hidden it in a box labeled "kitchen stuff" was enough to convince me that he knew that it was worth hiding. If he knew that much, why hadn't he pursued it? And if he did pursue it, had he run into a dead end?

The truth was, my father wasn't very motivated when it came to work—and this would have entailed work. He was motivated by two things: sex and fun (the first also falling into the second category). He didn't bring work home for the simple reason that he no longer really cared. It's probably why his book never got beyond the compilation stage. Early in his career he must have had some drive—he wouldn't have achieved the position he held if he hadn't. He had even written a few dozen papers that had been published in scholarly journals and had cowritten some textbooks. But I had a feeling that laziness was with him most of his career. Definitely in the last ten years, the emphasis was solely on having fun.

Why he hadn't done anything with the package was a question for another day. For now, the mystery was in my lap, and I was determined to solve it.

I found what I was looking for about an hour into my search. By that time I had been through about eighty percent of the boxes. It was in a box labeled "curtains." I suspected something when I picked up the box. It seemed too heavy for curtains, considering the size of the box. My heart was pounding as I slit the tape and opened the box. I was greeted with—surprise—curtains. But I expected that. I pulled them out and was left with a small canvas bag, like an old satchel.

I removed it from the box and opened the latch to the bag. The bag and its contents smelled heavily of mildew. I removed a stack of papers, which filled most of the bag, and quickly flipped through them. It was my grandfather's wartime papers. He was with the 392nd bomb group, part of the 8th Air Force, stationed at Wendling, England. Already, that was more information about him than I had known before. I put the stack back in the bag, and the bag back in the box. I replaced the curtains and folded the corners of the box to close it. That was something to look through later.