Basement Cleansing

We first moved to the house on Marcella Heights Drive when I was in third grade. Before that, we’d lived on Quint Avenue. Can’t you tell the difference just by the names of the streets? Quint Ave: old school, stately, could run a corporation. Marcella: a woman, perhaps a busy one, and current. And Heights Drive? Indecisive at best.

It was the late 60s, and having a rec room was where it was at. Our new house had a rec room, complete with linoleum, wood paneling and a tan brick fireplace. Center stage was the hi-fi, flanked by a handmade upholstered banquette and trestle table so the grownups could party like it was 1999. The TV was in the corner, and the turquoise chenille sofa from our old house’s living room looked right at home with the pole lamp and blond furniture that came along for the ride.

On the other side of the wall from this ultra-functional rec room was the combination laundry room/furnace room/beat-up piano and ping-pong table room. It was a room with a cement floor that worked for roller-skating when outside wasn’t feasible. We spent hours in this room as kids. Before the ping-pong table arrived, we had a small-sized pool table that we used within an inch of its life.

As we grew, this room became more of a dumping ground than a playroom. Our old puzzles, toys, trophies and records were piled unceremoniously onto the ping-pong table. Two paddles and a ball stayed in sight though, as if someone would decide to just play around the cast off dishes, prom dresses and troll dolls.

No one ever had the notion to clear any of it out.

Until, that is, I found myself the sole heir to all this bounty after my parents had both passed away, in 2006. Surveying the scene for the first time with a new eye, I picked up a smooshed but still grinning red Christmas elf – just like the Elf on the Shelf popular in today’s toddler’s Christmas worlds – and said to my husband, “Every bit of this is ours. Every last Harry Belafonte album, poker chip and BB gun. Honey, we’ve hit the jackpot.”

It took me months to be able even start sorting it all out. Each piece I touched brought forth a slush of memories. It surprised me how much my life really did flash before my eyes as I cleared out its remnants.

And it wasn’t just my life, as it turned out. I discovered my mom had saved every single cancelled check from her bank from 1953 on. For an entire afternoon, I went through the envelopes, learning how she’d spent her money, and how little there was to spend back then. She lent family members a surprising amount of the little she did have.

These were the kinds of things I learned; things that made other things make sense.

Things that swept through a lot more cobwebs than just the ones behind the old refrigerator with the pockmarks of rust all over its front that was kept in the basement to hold a stockpile of beer and preserved corsages and boutonnières from every dance my brother and I ever attended.  

Here’s the funniest part. Now, years after the last box and bag were carried out of the lower level of that house, in my mind, it’s all still there.

When I think of an object that sat in that furnace room for most of my life – and I think of holding it in my hands, for a moment I think I can just run down those steps and grab it. I know right where it’ll be.

Never mind that the house has had two new owners since I last shut the door.

Somehow, the overflow debris of my family’s life will forever be stored right where we left it. 

Two Pages* on Something I Didn't Finish

My dad went to his grave telling me I should’ve been a sportswriter.

Even though I became an elementary teacher, and he said he was proud of that, he still continued to ask me on a regular basis why I didn’t just “take up” sports writing. 

We’d be watching a Twins or Cardinals game together and I’d comment on what pitch I thought was coming next. He’d say, “Why don’t you write that down and send it to the Des Moines Register?” I’d look at him without a clue what to say in response.

He trained me to read the great sportswriters. During my childhood the sports section of the Des Moines Register was called The Big Peach. It was the color of a newspaper you’d had in your drawer for 20 years, but a little more peach than yellow.  Every morning at breakfast my dad read articles from it to me. Our favorite was the column from LA writer Jim Murray. He’d write things like “Walt Frazier’s hands are so fast he could steal hubcaps off moving cars,” and no one thought he was being racist because he wasn’t.  My dad would read notable box scores to me and tell me why they were notable, and each time I learned something new. 

 photo courtesy Ron Maly

By the time I was in high school, I knew more about national sports than most of the guys around me, unless those guys were my dad’s buddies.  I was chosen to edit the high school newspaper my junior year and so got to decide who the sports writer would be, and of course it was me.  The mundane part of this job was writing about the local scene: the high school teams. 

The fun part was writing an essay here or there about my favorite athletes like Brooks Robinson or Babe Didrickson or Walter Hagen.  I won an award that summer at journalism camp for an article I wrote about Adrian Dantley, Notre Dame’s All-American power forward from Washington DC’s legendary DeMatha Catholic high school. He was coached by the immortal Morgan Wootten. Wootten has the most wins as a head coach in the history of basketball on any level. His DeMatha team beat Power Memorial Academy, the team of Kareem Abdul Jabbar, then named Lew Alcindor, and ended that school’s 71-game winning streak.  His career coaching record stands at 1,274-192.

This was the kind of stuff my dad taught me to love writing and talking about. It made some guys afraid of me, but it made me sort of popular with some other guys, usually the ones in bars.

When I went off to college at the University of Iowa and majored in journalism, I headed over the Daily Iowan office, ready to join the sports writing team.   The editor was a guy who now writes for the Wall Street Journal.  You had to be interviewed to be on the staff.  By him. 

When I told him where I was from, and that I wanted to be on the sports writing staff, he said, “We don’t do many articles about 5 on 5 girls basketball here, this is the Big Ten.”  Since I was only 18, I looked at him without a clue what to say in response, just like I did with my dad many years later.

Now, I have plenty to say to both of them. I should probably get started.  

*Two Pages is a weekly assignment in my writing class with Abigail Thomas.