Last week I introduced you, my loyal audience, to the sunken living room of the house I grew up in. Be that as it may, this room, the rec room as we called it, was lower by only one step and was only referred to as “sunken” by realtors to make small children believe there was a pirate ship buried at the bottom of it. If it wasn’t for my older brother Gary discovering in the World Almanac that “sunken” gave us immunity from Greenhouse gases I would have made a strong case for camping in our back yard. However, once we found out that our rec room was saving us from asphyxiation, we relaxed into a continuous stream of cartoons on TV and awaited the arrival of my grandmother and her world-famous sugar cookies.
It is critical for the progression of this story to note that the one step down into this inner sanctum was made from several slick planks of wood. To my brother and I, this finish was an invitation to practice a sliding entrance to the rec room, a skill that was preceded by several other athletic feats that had turned our new house into a first-class gymnasium. We had already transformed the door moldings into chin-up bars, and the tiled soap dish in the shower to a foothold to grab the showerhead and swing out over the drain like monkeys.
Some of our athletic motivation, in all fairness, was not ours but came from a new program instigated by President Eisenhower called the President’s Council on Fitness. While our physical education at school usually involved running around the playground knocking each other down, the national fitness program began a regiment of push-up, sit-up and rapid-fire jumping jacks geared to get us in better shape than Russian children. When I raised my hand in gym and ask if we would be able to beat up a Russian child if we went to war, I was hauled off by my ear to the principal’s office, whose Cossack heritage was displayed in a framed picture on his wall. Ironically, the principal made me drop and do fifty push-ups that counted towards my presidential fitness award at the end of the year.
My brother, however, took this fitness program to a whole new level and along with the pep song, Chicken Fat, decided to continue the drills at home with round-the-clock tests of strength, agility, and random acts of athleticism. I quickly followed suit, using the sofa as a balance beam for example, and considered it all part of my school homework; my mother and father, however, looked at it as the destruction of private property.
Nevertheless, the feat of sliding into the rec room took on an Olympic quality, as if each slide was being monitored and recorded by Eisenhower himself. Given that we were performing in our own minds in front of the President of the United States, my brother found it necessary to be as dramatic as possible by singing the first couple of bars of the National Anthem as he built up speed through the living room and den, hitting the wood step at a dead run and then sliding down into the rec room as if making a curtain call for a Broadway production. Over time, it became rather natural for us to take a slight bow afterwards, as if the Council on Physical Fitness was giving us a standing ovation.
This ritual became so repeated and such an integral part of our family, that it wasn’t too long before it was rather commonplace, and no one was paying attention to our appearance at all. It was taken for granted that if Gary or I were not in the rec room, we would be arriving shortly at full speed, hit our slide, and take a casual bow to an imaginary audience.
Of course, if you were the one doing it, the effect felt more noteworthy, as it took a significant amount of physical coordination to pull it off. Start your slide too early and the carpet before the step stopped you dead in your tracks. Start the slide too late and it became just a really dumb looking half-skip, not worthy of a bow, ovation, or admiring nod from any President. However, if the slide was perfect, that is, carried out with the utmost timing, it was a beautiful sight to behold, much like seeing Fred Flintstone slide down the neck of a brontosaurus.
Unlike Fred though, we hit our slide only one out of every twenty-five times and the result was so anticlimactic, that one wonders why we made the effort at all. On those few occasions where we did nail the landing, we took a bow that no one saw, made a few adjustments to our posture, and walked over to the couch and sat down. It was all very family oriented, very clean, very polite, followed by a half hour of Wild Kingdom sponsored by Mutual of Omaha, or maybe some Get Smart depending on the mood of my parents.
Their mood had been recently on the upswing for a couple of reasons. First, and most important, my grandmother, G’ma P, was soon to arrive from Ohio to live with us. She had worked on the production line at Goodyear all her life and was ready to sit down for a while. My parents turned our back porch into a charming apartment for her to stay in, and in exchange she agreed to do all the cooking and chores and take care of us. At the time, I thought my grandmother was getting a heck of a deal with the bonus of receiving all the grandchildren she could handle.
Secondly, my parents, particularly my dad, was glad he would not have to build a bomb shelter in the back yard during the Cold War but would be able to retreat to the confines of a sunken living room for safety should Russia launch an inter-ballistic nuclear warhead. Rumor had it that a lot of families with shelters had passwords to protect themselves against panicking outsiders banging on their shelter door, trying to gain access as they burnt to a crisp from the nuclear fall-out. The almanac Gary was still reading on the subject gave him an idea.
“Jeff, I think we need a secret handshake to let only certain people into the rec room,” Gary announced, “Give me your hand.”
I reached out, and let Gary cross a couple of my fingers, then he spit on it.
“Hey,” I screamed, “Don’t! That is gross.”
“No, we have to practice it, so when the siren goes off, we can check people in at the step,” Gary continued, and then, started to show me the slimy shake again.
I yanked my hand back. “Dad isn’t going to like this! Mom’s not going to do it, either. She’ll get the paddle out, and you’re going get it,” I objected.
Gary thought for a moment peering at me through his four-inch-thick glasses.
“Yea, maybe you’re right. G’ma might get mad and go back to Ohio. What about if we just make them do the slide instead?!” Gary said, eyes widening.
“Yea, that’s it!” I nodded, “Let’s say you have to slide to get in.”
So, at precisely twelve o’clock on a Friday in 1963, with our city’s nuclear test sirens blaring outside, my grandmother came to live with us.
Unfortunately, the nuclear signal blasting at one hundred twenty decibels made G’ma’s arrival very untimely. No one could hear the greetings, and the welcoming gestures were skipped in order to get the door shut as fast as possible. The ear-splitting sound made our toy poodle a nervous wreck and my mom raced to put her under the kitchen sink to deafen the vibrations. For Gary and I, however, it was simply a call to action. We reacted the same way we always did when the siren went off, as if the Russians were at our back door. We dropped everything we were doing and raced through the house towards the step to make a perfect slide into the make-shift bomb shelter.
When G’ma arrived with test siren blaring, we had to make a decision no child should have to make at such a young age, that is, whether to hug G’ma as she stumbled in with a lifetime of material belongings or make the life-saving slide into a safety zone one step below. That was what the Cold War did to families; it pitted them against each other and brought out the worst in families.
Gary and I went for the slide. We took off down the hallway in a dead heat, then I made a decision to bear left, cut through the kitchen and beat Gary to the step. As I rounded the corner, and taxied towards the rec room, I cleared the first row of G’ma’s suitcases easily, but Gary, who was only a few steps behind did not fare as well. For those of you keeping score, mine would have been eight at this point on the Fitness chart, and Gary six. He tried to wave at G’ma going by, which threw off his timing, thus hitting his slide to the wooden step too early, then tripping over the Goodyear carry-on G’ma had received at her retirement party.
“That’s a fine how-do-you-do,” G’ma said, as we picked ourselves up and dusted off the radiation. “How’ve you boys been?”
“Fine,” we both answered and began helping her pick up the scattered trinkets and Ohio souvenirs. “What is this?” I asked, holding up a tiny sweater with five holes.
“I made that for Coco,” she answered, “It’s a doggie sweater.”
“I didn’t know she got that cold,” Gary said giving G’ma a hug and kiss. “Sorry about the slide.”
“We usually make it,” I piped in, “but your suitcase got in the way.”
I’ll try to remember that the next time I arrive from Ohio.”
The cynicism, the untimely siren, and a den full of overturned baggage, left us with an uncomfortable silence. Our bomb shelter entrance had also been unimpressive, and not in line with evidence that Gary and I were part of any fitness club. Fortunately, our toy poodle, Coco, arrived none too soon to break the silence. She ran in to greet everyone, then suddenly turned sideways at the last second to present her back end first, a strange and awkward approach that had never been explained on any episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. No bigger than loaf of bread, Coco then stopped to sniff the knitted sweater G’ma had made for her.
“Would you look at that?” G’ma P said, “She knows it’s hers. That is so precious.”
We had assumed we might get a bag of sugar cookies from G’ma upon her arrival from Ohio, but it was our dog Coco that actually cashed in, and this changed our normally benevolent view of our toy poodle pet into the beginning of a growing, insidious jealousy. In our heart, we knew we were gaining a grandmother, but our tiny pet seemed to be switching allegiances, marking an upsetting imbalance in our family structure. Something was amiss here. Gary and I could feel it.
We slipped out of G’ma’s grasp, around the spilt luggage, away to the place we had come to depend on to feel safe, to gain insights, and to become re-oxygenated, our sunken living room. We may not have known how to handle this new family dynamic, but we were sure we could find the answer on the Zenith TV. It might take switching to any of the three networks, but a nod from Gary let me know that somewhere, perhaps in an episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. or Bonanza, we could find out how we could regain our rightful place with G’ma, ahead of our pet dog now sitting proudly, sneering at us, in its perfectly knitted sweater from Ohio.