Yesterday's Enterprises

While doing 30 Days of Blogging in 2013, (something that I actually managed to do once or twice, unlike NaNoWriMo which I've managed to consistently fail at every year I've tried), one of the suggested topics was to share a memory of one of my parents. I didn't get to it during the month of blogging that year, but on Father's Day that June I wrote this entry about how my father spent hours making mostly military models throughout my childhood, and then described how he made me a set of three Star Trek Enterprises (the original, the Enterprise A, and the Enterprise D) before I went away to college, to take with me. I was pretty sure I still owned them, and ended with this speculation:

It's possible that somewhere in my parents' attic I have a shoebox full of Enterprise fragments, or I have the only models my father made that survived my childhood. Next time I go home, I may want to find out, but the odds are slim since I'm going in December and trips to the attic are weather-dependent.

I didn't make it into the attic in 2013 or 2014, even though I was in the house and the attic clearly isn't going anywhere, but this morning I decided I might as well go up while I remembered that I wanted to, and pulled down the steps.



As I mentioned in the previous entry, the attic isn't climate controlled. No air conditioning makes it up there, and there's very little heat. It's sort of warm right now in upstate New York (A balmy 34 degrees Fahrenheit! Practically summer!), so I figured long pants and a shirt would be warm enough to just climb up for a minute, search one box, and climb back down. My two boxes from college that are both still up there are blue and white striped lidded cardboard storage boxes (in college and after I was still into my all-encompassing "If it comes in blue, then I want it blue" phase, which lasted until about 1999, when living in an apartment painted entirely blue, every wall in every room floor to ceiling in this specific shade, cured me) with notecards describing the contents taped to each lid, and they should have been immediately right of the attic entrance.

They weren't.

Our attic used to be very neatly divided: my stuff at the far right, my brother's at the far left, and my parents' in the middle, closest to the entrance, because they would presumably need their stuff more often than we would need ours. In the intervening years, my stuff has slowly been shoved over by boxes placed in front of it, mostly Christmas items, and somehow my two blue and white boxes moved from the front of my stuff to the very back of my stuff, all the way over. Even worse, when I finally got to them after shimmying around Christmas boxes and moving a huge plastic bin of Legos (which was very heavy), I realized that my careful labelling boiled down to the same notation on both index cards: "Star Trek stuff".

21 year old me needs a stern lecturing about attention to detail.

I finally found the box of models in the second box, and carried it downstairs without opening it. If all the glue had dried and broken in the intervening time, I didn't want to try to find the pieces of these things after they rolled and bounced all over the floor of the attic. The box was not the sturdy shoebox I remembered, but all three ships were still wrapped in paper towels inside.

So, did they survive?

More or less, yes.

There's some discoloration on the top of them, from sitting in the sun on my desk for four years, which becomes really obvious when you turn them over:





If there actually was a stand, it wasn't in either box and is presumably gone, but the ships themselves are still in great shape, with paint, stickers, and glue intact, just like when Dad painted and glued them together in 1993:











Now we just have to get them back to Tennessee without breaking them.