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.