As evidenced by this post here: Those Quiet Moments, I spent some time in Beaver Dam with my dads family. My parents didn’t always bring me up there alone, often going up there with siblings.
I can recall seeing my brother Dan’s red glowing cigarette ember floating in the dark across my Grandma’s living room. I don’t know how well that ended for Dan but it’s one of my earliest memories. But that was at my grandmother‘s house.
Aunt Mae’s was a different experience. In one of Mae’s spare rooms, My sister Pee Wee and I would sometimes play “The floor is lava” while using the cushions from the “radio bed” as I liked to call it, as flotation devices. I slept in that room, and I can remember lying in the dark, the only light being from the radio dial and a backlit photograph of Mount Saint Helens that my father had bought for my aunt years before (I actually still own that picture). The only sound was “Heartache Tonight ” from the radio’s hidden speakers.
I once owned that piece of furniture too, and it is One of my regrets that I no longer do.
Anyway, we used the cushions from the stiff plaid sofa portions of that unit to keep from being consumed to our fiery deaths by the pretend magma beneath us.
I’d often run around in the basement to occupy my time. I was bored after all; I remember seeing some Bob Hope humor magazines underneath the mattress lid of the footrest ottoman that had been in the basement.
I didn’t get the jokes. Especially the cartoon of a bride, asking from the seat next to her groom at a wedding reception for pickles and ice cream.
There was a mini sauna there as well. It looked like a plastic medieval torture device. The basement was also adorned by an unfinished bathroom. Unfinished in 1979, and it remained unfinished in the mid 2000s.
My aunt Mae was the owner of the first cable box I ever saw. It was in her living room that I first saw The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and The Beguiled. (a film which haunts me to this day). I watched these films later than I should’ve, up on a Saturday evening, as my parents, my aunt Mae and uncle Roger played cards in the kitchen. I can still hear the clinking of glasses, the muffled laughter over whiskey sours and brandy old fashioneds, and the fog of cigarettes. The buzz and crackle from the television that was on a cart in that dining room area, where I first saw the static-hidden teaser trailer for Ridley Scott’s Alien.
This was a place they entertained themselves so many times over the years.
There was also a Ben Cooper Wolfman jiggler that I played with often when I was there. Back in 1979, which I think was the last time I was there as a child, I remember hanging the Wolfman by the little string that was affixed to his back from a peg in the basement pole. Back in the mid 2000s, when aunt Mae had me over for the first time in many years, I went down into that basement because my uncle Roger wanted to show me something.
Standing in the glow coming through the basement windows, taken in by the dust floating through the air, wondering if the particles had been there when I was a kid, I saw something else that definitely had been there in my youth.
Hanging from the pole was the Wolfman.
Now, a sibling’s history says that I had a nephew that apparently played with that Wolfman as well, however he had the decency to always hang it back where I had left it some 20+ years before. I kind of got a chill down my spine when I saw it there. It was almost like that entire basement had been frozen in time.
I guess in some ways, it was.
