Post 9 - The Basement

 

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

A Toast To: My Dad - please don't be mad.

Song Pairing: The Guess Who "No Sugar Tonight / New Mother Nature” (from the album, American Woman, 1970).

By now I think I have established my love of fur babies. I have introduced my crazy pupperoo, Boo, to the "Redheads" (that's you). Out walking the Boo last week, I thought about how lucky I've been to have so many pets. In the case of Boo, the only reason it's possible for me to have her is because of a shared arrangement I have with her Daddy. This made me think, how did I manage in the past? How did my parents manage? Admittedly, Boo is spoiled rotten, and I am absolutely the problem. She gets four walks a day. She is not let out in a backyard, on a leash, to aimlessly wonder until she does her business. Boo is also very rarely left alone. As I continued my stroll, I pondered about how, as a kid, we left our dog Daisy by her lonesome all day long? And then I remembered, the basement.

In my very first home, the basement was a place that spooked the fuck out of me. Obviously, it was unfinished but not in the same way basements are "unfinished" today. Unfinished at this particular house meant the concrete was completely exposed. All walls, floors, and ceilings were bare-naked, au naturel. There were windows, most were cracked, rotting, or missing a hinge. Opening one was a bit of a gamble as to whether it would close again or break. There was electrical, and lighting - bulbs hung from the ceiling, turned on by pulling a string. It was a damp environment...so musty. Oh, and it was cold, but in summer, the basement was sweet relief because we didn't have an air conditioner. Was the basement used? In the beginning, only for storage.

Our house was a bungalow, so the basement floorplate was sizeable. It was divided into four sections by walls built of cinder blocks. Directly at the bottom of the stairs was a large space to the left that I will call the storage room, and to the right a smaller, narrow space used by my Dad as his workshop. From the workshop, there was a doorway into the largest space. I shall name this the multipurpose room. Finally, we come to the pit of doom room, which could be entered from either the multipurpose room or from the storage area.

The storage space is self-explanatory. No items of value were left on the floor because, like I said, the basement was damp, sometimes wet. I don't remember it ever flooding per se, but if you left a cardboard box on the floor, it would absorb moisture from the ground and eventually become soft and fall apart. The one cool thing in the storage room was my Dad's lathe. Don't ask me where he got it, or why a man sees a machine of this grandeur and thinks "oh that would be perfect for the basement." The thing was a mix of metal and cast iron, so heavy as fuck. I asked Google to find me an image of a lathe, and it is now considered "vintage." Yes, I am rolling my eyes. Was my Dad a millworker by trade? No. Can my Dad do anything he puts his mind to? Yes, and so there came to be a lathe in our basement. The only thing I remember my Dad making on this machine was a bat. I do remember there being a shit tonne of wood shavings on the floor though, so he must have made other things. I found sweeping up the wood shavings to be very therapeutic. 

The workshop only makes sense now, right? My Dad's workshops over the years have been super creative and well organized. Pretty sure he still builds his own workbenches. My Dad is the kind of guy who thinks if you need to buy a prefabricated workbench, you probably shouldn't have a workshop. The workbench in our basement back then had a line of Gerber baby food jar lids nailed to the underside. My Dad filled the jars with fasteners and screwed the jars back onto the lids. Very resourceful. I thought all the jars hanging there in perfect sequence, displaying different things, was pretty cool and neat to look at. Above the workbench was an extensive pegboard. The pegboard held all of his tools, including chisels for the lathe. I especially liked how he drew an outline around most of the items so he knew where to put them back. Each tool had a dedicated space on the board. I too like things being returned to the exact place they were found. He, of course, had a very manly red metal toolbox, a ghetto blaster, and la pièce de résistance...a money jar. Not your average money jar, though. Custom. I'm talking an old one-gallon pickle jar with a slot cut into the lid. A wide-mouth shot glass placed inside and the jar filled with water. Drop a coin through the slot, watch it flutter its way down, and if it landed in the shot glass? You won. What did you win? Nothing. But! Ask me how fun it was to save money using that piggy jar.

We move now to the multipurpose room. This room evolved over the years, but it was the most serious of the spaces. It had the most potential, was the most habitable, but most importantly, the least scary of all the other rooms. It was the brightest, and the flooring was in better condition, level, still holding together well. At one point, I think we even laid down some old area rugs. Wait, my bad, that was to cover up divots. My Dad made this space into his man cave. Hand-me-down furniture, a standard sized tv on a corner stand, a converter with a twenty-foot cord, Habs paraphernalia, a dartboard, and a pool table. I think at one point, a beer fridge moved in. No bathroom down there, though. Major annoyance and seriously inconvenient when Hockey Night in Canada was on. My family was not well off. We never went without, and I wouldn't say we were poor, or even close to poor, but my parents struggled financially for sure. Somehow, we always had cool things though, like a pool table. Again, where the fuck did my Dad get a pool table? Did it come with the house? Did he inherit it? If you have ever owned a pool table, rear-projection tv, or a hot tub, these are all things people tend to want to leave behind rather than move. The multipurpose room is where my Dad taught me how to play darts and shoot stick. It was where I learned I liked hockey and where, on occasion, he gave me a sip of his Labatt Blue.

At about the same time my Dad told my Mom to find another place to live, the multipurpose room underwent serious renovations. Not in an exciting, glamorous, normal way. My Dad loved sports; he watched sports, played sports, and he worked at a sporting goods store. The store went under, and my Dad was suddenly left to care for two kids without an income. He needed a new work plan quick. I remember the day clearly when my Dad came home from the library with a book about silkscreening. In what seemed like a week, the multipurpose room evolved into his new place of work. First, a desk, where he would sketch ideas or trace images, then bolts of mesh, gallons of print ink, and slowly equipment, piece by piece. The workshop was where he hand-made the screens. Wooden frames made out of 1x1s nailed together, tightly pulled silkscreening mesh stapled to them. He built racks used to dry and store the screens and hung shelves everywhere to store the containers of ink. Gradually, the one-arm printing press morphed into multi-arms, and the portable flash dryer upgraded to a full-on conveyor belt unit. Boxes upon boxes of t-shirts were delivered to our home until one day my Dad's small idea took off and he outgrew the basement. The fondest of memories I have of the basement is the walls covered in print ink. My Dad, a talented self-taught graphic artist, is colourblind. Back when he started the business, inks did not come in the full array of Pantone colours. If a customer wanted a custom colour, my Dad would have to mix inks. The trial and error method was used to create these new colour recipes. Trial colours were slapped onto the walls with a putty knife. Dad relied heavily on others to give him a thumbs up when the colour was closest to what the customer wanted. By the time we moved out, the walls were my Dad's very own technicoloured dream coat.

This is all well and good. I know you are choked up reading at this point, thinking "wow, what nice memories she is sharing about her Dad." Are you also thinking "what about the damn pit of doom room?" and "how the hell does all of this loop back to her caring for her childhood dog?" 

Right. Here it is. 

The pit of doom room. The area of the basement with not one, but two access points. This was the creepiest, darkest, moistest, mustiest, cobwebbed, critter-filled spot in the basement. My Dad placed 2x4's down in order for us to traverse the room because the concrete floor seemed to have been jackhammered at one point. This was also where the big old metal furnace shook, rattled, and rolled like thunder every time it kicked in. So, who used this room and what purpose did it serve? Well, drumroll please...the doom room served the one, the only, Her Royal Highness the Queen, Daisy. This was Daisy's throne, her very own, glorified, one hundred square foot, doggie litter box. Yup. It was also a place I may have copped a squat many times as a kid, and guaranteed my brother is not innocent either. The pit of doom room was our home’s unofficial second bathroom. I know what you're thinking. Go right ahead and think it. Think all of it. You're not wrong. Who's hitting the unsubscribe button?

This house was a rental. Shocking, I know. The National Capital Commission of Canada rented it out. Can't say I know if they ever contacted my Dad to ask about the paint or the potty. We moved out when I turned eleven. The house still stands. I drive past it occasionally, purely for nostalgic reasons or when I am feeling a little melancholy. Just so happens there is a nature trail up the road that I take Boo to. It was my childhood home, and both my brother and I were saddened when we moved. I have had dreams where I go back. I have even thought about knocking at the door to see if whomever lives there now would offer a tour if I told my sappy story. I would leave out the basement part. Other than the exterior being repainted, it looks exactly as we left it. I wonder what the interior looks like today? I bet the basement is a real rec room, fully finished, where good memories continue to be made. It's probably best I keep it a mystery though. Reality seems to always ruin the images my mind makes up. I also know, there is no way in hell I could keep a straight face walking down the stairs again anyways. 

RR

xo