Fun and Games Upstairs

Fun and Games Upstairs

The upstairs of 828 was also where we played, especially on cold or rainy days or in the evenings that weren’t before a school day. The games we played there were basic 1950’s inside games like Chutes and Ladders, Monopoly or various card games. We also played with electric train sets, slot (racing) cars; we built forts out of wooden blocks and placed it full of little plastic (WWII) army men. Then, of course, we knocked the forts to pieces with blocks hurled into the air by makeshift catapults.



There were also play things to do that would certainly be recognized by generations that came before and after us. We made tents by tying bed sheets to the headboard of the beds and houses by tying the sheets to just about anything in the room. I don’t remember what we did in those tents and houses; the attraction was probably just making a structure of our own and being in that space for a time, knowing that Mom or Dad wouldn’t come into it.



There were other made-up games. With two double beds in the big bedroom made for a perfect platform for playing pirates or army or god knows whatever other games I forgot. There was no shooting of cannons on those pirate ships. We just played the part where the two ships were side by side and it was time for the crew to jump or swing to the other ship/bed and slaughter the other crew. We bigger kids would often catapult the smaller ones onto the other ship/bed by lying on our backs with our feet on their little butts and launch them across the divide, only sometimes over-shooting and creating a crying crises.



 I was 18 at Christmas time 1965 - check out those Cons!!

And then there was Slow-Motion Football. We would push the beds together and play football, or course. (A game inspired by the introduction of the slow-motion replay introduced by sports broadcasting over the television networks. As I recall, there was no passing, in fact we didn’t even use a football. The fun apparently was just in the piling up of our young bodies at the scrimmage line, recreating the drama we witnessed on TV. We didn’t even keep score and it wasn’t even a “game” in the traditional sense, i.e. of one team winning and the other losing. It wasn’t that we were the precursors of the “Everyone’s a Winner” philosophy. Our competition came out in Monopoly and Ping-Pong and backyard baseball.

Slow-Motion Football was started by the younger kids, probably George, Mike and/or Fred (7^th, 8^th & 9^th). I remember playing with them but not often. I was probably entering into the “I’m too cool for this” phase. Or maybe I was just too big for them. The trick to SMF was not crashing forward but rather holding back. If you were moving in slow motion and realized the other “team” was going to be victorious in the play, the urge was to speed it up a little to make the tackle or break free of the opposing tackle. But I don’t ever remember that this caused arguments about someone moving too fast, cheating. Maybe this was because we weren’t keeping score, or that the roster of defense or offense was fluid from play to play.

All these games were hard on the beds, especially the frames. The mattresses were pretty well worn when Mom and Dad got them, whenever and however that was. They were more like thick hammocks with a bowl-like shape, which made for intimate sleeping with three in a bed. But that’s a story for later. The bed frames were the vulnerable part. It was with dread that we broke them because we knew Dad would be mad; he always was when  he had to fix something. We were constantly being reminded to not be so rough on the beds and I supposed we tried. But hey, we were kids.

Most of the games upstairs were played by us boys. I don’t remember Linda or Nancy playing anything except Monopoly, cards or other board games, or maybe the slot cars. I do remember playing games with my two sisters. There was one slightly weird “game” some of us boys played in their room. That is, of course, for later.

- Bob

Ten in the Bed and the Little One Said…

I think the thing that people ask me most about growing up in a family with 10 brothers and a sister is “Where did everyone sleep?”

It’s a reasonable question, especially since I raised my own three children in a time when a “bedroom per child” was the norm. That didn’t happen at 828.

Let me say from the start—and this is directed more to the brothers who still think that Nancy and I, fifth and sixth in the birth order, had a room of our own: That simply wasn’t true, at least not always.

Nancy and I—born 18 months apart—shared a room at the back of the house, but my youngest brother Gary also was in our room in a crib at the foot of the bed. I know he was there until he was at least a toddler before Mom moved him to the little boys’ room, because I remember him standing up and walking back and forth in the crib. And since Gary was born when I was 10, I was practically a teenager by the time we girls had our own room.[1]

The upstairs at 828 had four bedrooms and a bathroom. There were two larger rooms at the front of

Alan, in 1958

the house that in my early childhood had been shaded by a large elm tree, before disease wiped out the many elms that lined Spruce Street. Mom and Dad’s room was the smaller of the two, it was on the east side of the house and had a nice cross breeze. It always felt several degrees cooler than the other bedrooms. (Of course there was no air-conditioning, only a window fan in the upstairs landing to cool those hot summer nights.)

The little boys occupied the largest of the four bedrooms. It also faced the street and had a cross breeze, but for some reason never felt as cool as Mom and Dad’s room. Maybe it was the sweat and grime of a half-dozen little boys huddled together that made the room feel less fresh, several in a double and the others in bunk beds. (A trivia question here: which of six "little boys"—George, Mike, Fred, Alan, Joe, and Gary—headed up an in-house singing group called “The Bunk Beds”?) The crib was also in there for a while, before it was moved into our room, and again after Nancy and I reached puberty.

I think it was my older brothers who complained most about us girls having our own room, for they shared a very small bedroom at the back of the house, probably only 8’ by 11’. It had an angled doorway that opened into what we called the upstairs hall, which led to all the rooms. But there was no real door to the big boys’ room, only a vinyl folding one Dad put up for privacy. But in a house brimming with activity, that flimsy folding door was soon broken and often repaired.

The big boys’ room, at least in the late ‘50s when I’m remembering it, was where Bill, Bob, and John slept in a double bed. By then my oldest brother, Dan, was at the diocesan seminary in Cincinnati and spent the school year there. (He left the seminary after his senior year of high school, and I remember some of the siblings joking that the reason he joined tin the first place was to to have his own room.)

I’m not sure, but I think John, the youngest of the older boys, was consigned to the center of the bed. Bill, the second oldest, slept on the outside, and Bob got the inside, facing the wall.

During the summer when Dan was home, Bob and John would often sleep on a small fold-out bed on the back porch, and Nancy, ever the tomboy, would sometimes join them on the floor when it was too hot upstairs. (Not sure where they slept when Dan was home for the Christmas holidays!)

It was crowded, no doubt, but that closeness also brought about some wonderful shared experiences. Bob’s going to talk about that more in our next posting!

—Linda

[1] Yeah, well, Linda seems to forget that the most important time to have a room of one’s own is during the teenage years.—Bob

The Stairs Going Up – Part Two

There seemed to always be someone ascending or descending the stairs at 828. During the day, us kid bounded up and down at top speed. At night, Dad, with his slower gait, walked up those steps after his nightly check of the house—doors locked, stove off and nothing flammable near the burners, no dripping water faucet.

The smell of turkey also rose up the stairs early on Thanksgiving morning; Mom often put the big bird in the oven at 4 a.m. so it was ready for our one o’clock meal. It was always well over twenty pounds. The comings and goings on those stairs in some ways were ideal, but not always. There were harder things, too, more complicated memories.

Those wooden stairs could make warning sounds, for they creaked when anyone walked up them. Except for Mom when she wanted to be stealthy, who knew just where to step (near the outside of the tread) to minimize the sound of her coming up.

The creaking usually alerted any would-be rule breakers to cease whatever outlawed activity they were engaged in, from minor infractions, like listening from around the bend to a forbidden TV program, to major ones, like performing acts considered a “mortal sin”[1] against the sixth commandment. Mom either never caught me or let on that she had; if the latter, it was probably because she would have been too embarrassed to confront me. I’m happy to report (now, 50+ years later) that neither the Catholic rules nor the possibility of eternal damnation stood a chance against the demands of my nature. Even in a house with little privacy, nature finds a way. As Mom often told us, necessity is the mother of invention.

At the top of the stairs, in the smallest of the four bedrooms was a small desk where many of us did our homework. Sitting at that desk, I remember how the sounds from the first floor could distract me, a flighty, fidgety kid. Trying to write a composition was excruciating as the noises traveled upward—a TV show, two kids quarreling, Mom or Dad yelling at someone for doing or not doing something.

When I was a junior or senior in high school, my immediate-younger brother, John, often had his friends over for Kool-Aid and popcorn parties. These get-togethers often included my sisters, Linda and Nancy, who followed John in age, and some of their friends. With all of them crowded around the dining room table, there was a great deal of laughter and joking. Silly stuff.

Listening to my siblings’ silliness, I remember wanting to join them, but was unable to. I didn’t know how; I didn’t know what I could say. Sitting at that desk, I felt imprisoned, not knowing how to integrate my all-too-serious self into their light-hearted party. The small solace for my big ache was to write a poem about my woes, my loneliness. A poem thankfully lost to posterity.

By then I was no longer silly, if I ever had been. Any lightheartedness had been jettisoned long before high school. Knocked in the head by too many rules, too many “Children Should Be Seen and Not Heard” from my parents and too many “You’ll go to Hell” from priests and nuns.

The upstairs of 828 could sometimes be a lonely, difficult place for me, but it also was a place where deeper connection with my sibs took root. That will be Part III of the upstairs of 828.

—Bob

 

 

 

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[1] A mortal sin, for those unfamiliar with Catholicism, is a major offense against God that dooms the wrongdoer to eternal damnation and everlasting pain and suffering, unless the sin is confessed.

A Mother's Day Tribute

Sunday, May 10, is Mother’s Day, and in memory of a mother who was often at the center of 828 activity, I am sharing a column I wrote for a local newspaper in 2008, the year Mom died. At the time I was writing a biweekly column for the paper near where I live—Mars, Pennsylvania, about 45 minutes north of Pittsburgh. It was published on Mother’s Day.

A Final Mother’s Day Tribute

For me, the moment of my mother’s death was an epiphany, an intuitive leap of understanding achieved at a time when I thought I’d feel only sadness and loss.

During the five years of watching Mother’s slow steady decline following a stroke, I thought often of what it would be like when she was gone—the emotional intensity of losing the one who gave me life, the sadness at no longer being able to sit in her presence, and the relief in knowing that her earthbound struggles were finally over. Mother died in February at the age of 87; today marks the first celebration of Mother’s Day without her.

By all outward appearances, Mother led a common, unremarkable life. She grew up the oldest of eight children in a not-so-prosperous farm family in western Ohio. She graduated from high school and took a job as a typesetter at a small printing company, earning 10 cents an hour. She married my father—a factory worker-turned baker who left school after the eighth grade—and together they raised a large family. She was widowed unexpectedly at age 60, traveled a bit following my father’s death, remarried at age 75, and died a dozen years later.

 
But the ordinary circumstances of her life belie her true nature, for Mother was an extraordinary woman whose greatness lie in her ability to push beyond her circumstances and to appreciate each day for what it was, and to pass along that appreciation to those around her.

It was through Mother that I came to understand the preciousness of everyday life: As a child, she knelt with me in prayer. Standing beside me at the kitchen stove, she shared her love of cooking. Doing homework under her watchful eye, I came to know the joy of learning. Preserving vegetables from the family garden, I learned frugality and to work hard. And resting on the front porch at the end of a day, I discovered the pleasures of being with family on a warm summer evening.

But it was in death that she shared her greatest gift, for in dying she showed me how to live. A lifelong learner, Mother drew lessons from her own life, and she shared them with her family. She told us of how being with my father when he died had taken away her fear of death: “His death was so peaceful and serene,” she wrote in a final letter to her children, opened on the occasion of her own death. “When I think about dying, I am at peace.… The greatest gift I can wish for you is a happy death.”

Lying on her deathbed at the nursing home, she wavered for two days between life and death, as her children and grandchildren came to say good-bye. Labored breathing marked her presence in the room, and as each of us took turns sitting by her side, she willed herself back towards life, mouthing a dry kiss or stirring slightly as we squeezed her hand.As she lay dying, her brow furrowed. Was she being beckoned from afar? Was her distant gaze fixed on a life beyond our knowing?

Finally, in the hour before sunrise, she left us, seemingly eager to embrace whatever lie ahead. The ultimate teacher, Mother showed me how to live a good life; in dying, she shared another lesson—possibly the most important—in life’s long journey. 

To all women who nurture and care for others, have a blessed and happy Mother’s Day.

Stories about our mother will undoubtedly make their way into other of our writings, for Mom was very involved and highly influential in her children’s lives. Most posts I am sure will recognize her remarkable work as a mother, but others may take exception to the heavy hand with which she guided us. Today, though, I celebrate the goodness of the woman who first nourished my brothers, sister and me. Seven years gone, and I still miss her physical presence in my life.

—Linda