BoT redux!
Better let ’em in on this bit of Bears on Textalia.
In my room
My childhood bedroom was about the size of my current bedroom, but a bit more square. A closet faced with two bifold doors, I think, was bumped out from the wall that also held the entry door. I suppose the room must have been about fifteen feet square. In the center of the wall to one’s right, on entering, was a single dual-frame sash window, double-paned, with faux multi-pane inserts delicately mounted onto the window’s frames.
The wood used to construct these multi-pane inserts was a light wood, such as pine, stained transparently brown and dried to a featherweight after twenty years of central heat in the face of Indiana’s increasingly brutal winters. I recall taking the struts out and being puzzled, and little bothered, by the fakeness of the inserts. Today, I rather imagine I will require some sort of faux multi-pane inset when we replace the singlepane aluminum frame windows that predominate in our new house. The wood in the inserts in my childhood home rang like a bell when tapped, in consequence of their perfectly dry state.
The walls of my room were a pale blue, as I believe the carpet was. My single bed ran along the wall farthest from the door. On the wall containing the window, my dresser was between the corner and the window, with about three wall-mounted shelves above the dresser.
I have no clear memory of the blank wall opposite the window, the wall I faced if I sat up in bed. I think I must have changed the arrangement of this wall relatively frequently. I had a desk in the room, at which I did homework, and several three-cove portable shelves that my father had made when I was about seven. Therefore I assume these furnishings were ranged against this wall. I believe a reader of this blog possesses both desk and shelves.
As a teen, the walls of the room were quite nearly covered with posters of musicians and shows, only some of which I still have. I do not recall to whom I gave my large collection of large-size photo posters but was surprised when we moved this winter to fond that I had not taken them with me to Seattle.
On occasion, in my teens, I left the house by my bedroom window after feigning sleep, returning after a night out. I do not recall if my parents ever discovered this. I’m reasonably certain that they will only learn that I also surreptitiously brought a girlfriend over one night and spent the night in my bed with her should they chance to read this. I hasten to assure the reader, parental or otherwise, that I did not ask her to engage in such monkeyshines as entering or exiting via the window.
I have a small woven rug from Latin America in my current bedroom which has traveled with me from my childhood room to this one. On first thought, I think it may be the only thing in my bedroom that was also in that one, over twenty years past.
Fly little bird
Paper Forest points out a plenty of paper planes.
Householding
A friend mentioned to me today that in the piece I posted yesterday, my description of the house I grew up in makes it sound like a mansion. It’s not; it’s a factory-issue Cape Cod two story with two first-floor bump-outs, and each interior room is of modest dimensions. Technically, the largest room in the house is the basement, raw concrete in most places and open from foundation wall to foundation wall. The first year we lived there, I have vague memories of my folks fighting to stem a minor flood entering via the single exterior door in the basement, at the foot of a flight of stairs which were designed to drain into an inset grill and runoff, clogged from neglect.
The basement was where I first tried to play rock and roll, to no avail, with a dear friend who (small town!) later played bass in an early band of the current householder. It’s also where my parents’ immense pre-parenting grad-student and college-professor paperback collection wound up. This notably included (to my adolescent delight) Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Toffler’s Future Shock (you’re soaking in it!), Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and a post-Supreme-Court publication of Fanny Hill, which disappointingly proved as understimulating as the Supreme Court decision reprinted in full in the frontmatter.
It was also the part of the house my sister decided to sleep in in the months leading up to her death. At that point in her life, she preferred open and undadorned spaces and slept only on a tatami mat, a practice she’d selected years earlier and stuck with.
The basement also housed a relatively well-lit laundry room, a rather gloomy workshop which also provided storage, and in later years, a narrow room my father built by walling a part of the basement off with cinderblock in a largely successful attempt to create a cave-like room with minimal temperature fluctuation – a caveau for wine.
Beginning in the very early seventies, my father determined to become a winemaker, and each year from then until now – that’s about 35 years, for those reaching for the abacus – made one or more varieties of wine, usually in batches no larger than a single carbuoy. His first attempts are best considered as learning excercises. But by 1980 he knew what he was doing, and to this day, his skill has only grown.
I also recallbasement retreats in the face of repeated, and ever-more-traumatic, tornado drills. In spring, tornado watches and warnings would recur with increasing frequency, something that must remain the case today. The family would repair to the basement and listen to classical music through the crackle of slight static on the basement radio until the watch was declared over. As my sister entered adolescence, these events became ever-more traumatic. Eventually, it became apparent that she was experiencing a full-blown phobic reaction to the drills, something that may have been grounded in my family’s role as spectators of the April, 1974 tornado outbreak.
The year I moved to Seattle, my parents moved to North Carolina, and asked me if I wanted to take any of the stuff that had remained at the house since my departure about fifteen years prior. The material was stored under the basement stairs.
I looked at the pile of stuff. My first stuffed doll, Mr. Bun Rab. My collection of plastic models of space and aerospace technology. A three-foot display mannequin representing an American astronaut obtained from the show windows of a Chilean department store in 1969 at my somewhat frantic three-year-old insistence. Of course I wanted it.
Turning to my mom, I told her that It was trash and that she should just throw it away.
Al Ghoul
An idle witticism by a friend led me to look, briefly, into the etymology of “alcohol.”
As he jokingly suggested, the word comes to English via Arabic:
In general usage, alcohol (from Arabic al-kukhūl الكحول = “the spirit”, “the chemical”.)
The wikipedia entry takes a pleasant jaunt into free association, worth examining:
However, this derivation is suspicious since the current Arabic name for alcohol, الكحول = ALKHWL = al???, does not derive from al-kuhul. The Qur’an in verse 37:47 uses the word الغول = ALGhWL = al-ghawl — properly meaning “spirit” (“spiritual being”) or “demon” — with the sense “the thing that gives the wine its headiness”. The word al-ghawl also originated the English word “ghoul”, and the name of the star Algol. This derivation would, of course, be consistent with the use of “spirit” or “spirit of wine” as synonymous of “alcohol” in most Western languages. (Incidentally, the etymology “alcohol” = “the devil” was used in the 1930s by the U.S. Temperance Movement for propaganda purposes.)
I’ll drink to that!
A play
Fellow MeFite childhood acquaintance Grumblebee is involved in a theatrical production in the NYC environs.
See Through
Pella’s irritatingly-hard-to-bookmark online custom window design widget is interesting.
Look to the Trees
Behind my childhood house, there was an immense city park, roughly following the contours of a creek that sat between the cul-de-sac my home was on and the parking lot of the Indiana Bell office building about 500 yards away. The sides of the mostly-gentle hills leading into the valley were uniformly suburban-lawn length grass, cleared years ago and mowed by the city every three weeks or so. In the bottomlands and down some small defiles leading to the creek (unambiguously pronounced ‘crick’) were a few remnants of what may well have been old-growth forest – a stand of about four immense knotty cedar trees, a couple of beautiful and immense oaks, and a forty-foot stump of a tree that may have been oak.
This stump was entirely hollow on the inside. There was an opening at the base of the trunk large enough to admit a full-grown person, and the interior of the tree was about three feet across. The insides of the trunk had been burned smooth at some point in the past. We referred to it as “the lightning stump,” and throughout my childhood I assumed that a stroke of lightning had burned out the trunk’s interior.
However, at some point after the tree had been burned out, someone had nailed foot-long two-by-fours to the interior of the trunk all the way to the top of the trunk. For years, one could clamber up the inside of the trunk and perch atop the hollow cylinder, gazing at the brambles and trees and across the park to the inviting spectacle of the half-filled Bell parking lot or onto the undeveloped lots abutting the parklands. To the east, the second growth forest of Mary’s farm overtopped the stump.
Other industrious predecessors had likewise labored long over the design and construction of ambitious treehouses in the two tallest of the cedars. In one of these gnarled giants, platforms large enough to hold three kids each had been erected at three heights within the tree, the highest of these large platforms easily 60 feet up. There was one more platform in this tree, at the fey top of the branches, nailed into a multiply-branched juncture where the limbs measured as much as three inches across.
Climbing into this crow’s nest caused the entire top of the tree to sway mightily, and a gust of wind would whip the platform back and forth in an arc which certainly seemed to be fifteen feet in section.
It’s my understanding that the hollow tree is no longer accessible, the brambles having overtaken the entrance, and the boards on the interior having long fallen away. One would also expect that the wood of the trunk itself would have begun to soften and rot into nothing, forty years down the road. Likewise, the treehouse platforms were largely gone the last time I visited the park, well over ten years ago.
The brambles that formed the underbrush in the defiles were large, arched pricker bushes whose limbs brushed the earth in an apparently impenetrable curtain. To a kid, though, the branches could be pushed aside with care, revealing a natural shelter around the base of each of the plants. The plants clustered and provided extensive tunnels large enough to stand upright within over a bare dirt floor, unencumbered by any undergrowth. These natural clubhouses became a base of operations for the neighborhood kids, storehouses for the peculiar treasures uncovered in the park. These treasures primarily consisted of weatherbeaten issues of Penthouse magazine and the occasional dropped or discarded bag of pot, pipe, lighter, or on one memorable occaison, a peculiar blue device which was embossed with the words “Power Hitter.”
It took me years to figure out that this was also a marijuana-consumption tool.
Make Room
A Flash-based online room planner.
Oh, and one more thing
While Viv and I were at the nordic behemoth’s caves, I received a voicemail from an old friend in Bloomington, someone I knew in high school and later in the music scene: he and his wife and kids have moved into my childhood home on the far east side of town. Far out. I have no idea how he figured out that it used to be our house.
I have a bunch of stories for him, obviously.
It might be fun to work on them here, too. Writing about that house and my mostly negative feelings about it might be beneficial for me in relation to this place. I really hated living there, because it was so far away from things I wanted to be close to in the center of town. What’s a bit odd is that I remember kind of hating it when I was a little kid too, before I could have cared about living on the outskirts of town.
When we first moved there, the subdivision was still partially in development, raw dirt piles, empty lots, road graders and the like just down the road. Playing in the dirtpiles was fun, sculpting cities of mud and riding bikes up and down the transient midwestern arroyos.
It still felt like we were too far from anything to bother even wanting to leave the house. The Mall was a bit over a mile away toward town, but of course these postwar developments are pedestrian-hostile, and that’s unbearable for a child. Once I was old enough to walk to the mall on my own, around age 12, I found it essentially repulsive and lost interest in visiting.
Our house was relatively old, having been constructed in the mid-sixties on a very traditional plan. I suppose if Viv and I had seen the place in another context out here while looking for the place we eventually bought I would rather have liked it, although it would have been well beyond our means – the place has two master bedroom suites, three and a half baths, five bedrooms, a living room, a family room with an open plan kitchen, a dining room, fireplace, basement, two-car garage, level RV-size driveway, and a freaking huge lot – the specific reason I hate the very idea of yardwork, actually. It’s backed by an immense farm, overgrown back to 80-year forest and apparently owned and under the benevolent protection of a local rockstar in accordance with the wishes of my late ex-neighbor Mary, who was responsible for regrowing the forest as well as keeping a chicken barn full of cats and a semi-feral dog pack back in the wood.
The farm’s last buildings burned down in 1983 or 1984, as I recall, but you could still see the lanes the farmer’s family had carefully bordered with a profusion of daffodils every spring.