I grew up in a mid-century ranch-style house, very similar to what I live in now. Characterized by long hallways, carports, and picture windows, we also had what realtors have come to refer to as a “sunken” living room. When my parents told us we were going to move to a house that had a room below ground level, I envisioned a room with a subterranean culture buried at the bottom of an active volcano, or a lost world teaming with exotic creatures. I was so disappointed when we went over to see our new living space for the first time.
“Is that it?” I said, looking out across a vacant, planked wooden floor.
“What?” my mom said, “you mean this room? Yes, this is it.” She must have felt a bit of an extra squeeze from my hand. “What’s wrong, is there something you don’t like?”
“Well,” I hesitated, “I thought you said it was sunken.”
“Oh, honey, that’s just an expression. It means the room is a little lower.”
“One step?” I questioned.
“Did you think it was a lot lower, like you could dive into it?” She asked.
“Kind of. Gary told me it would be like going to a different world, like in Twenty-two Leagues Under the Sea,” I said.
“Twenty Thousand Leagues?”
“Yes, that’s the one. The one with Elvis.”
“Ummm, go find your brother please,” she answered which is always the way she answered me when my older brother tried to teach me something. But I took off to find Gary, who was checking out another fantastic house feature, a laundry shoot which he had told me was a door opening to an amazing water slide “straight down to the basement.”
That delusion didn’t quite turn out like I had hoped either, but it was all part of getting used to our move to a different home. Our sunken living room soon became known as the recreation room, rec room for short, which to me meant a place where destruction reigned supreme. Not only was that also false, but “recreation” was not an accurate description for the room. There was no ping-pong table or sling shots laying around, and the one time we tried to roller skate, albeit at six a.m., brought out the dreaded wooden paddle.
Just the same, it was clear that the only form of recreation that was going to happen in this rec room was watching our Zenith TV, a box that was only slightly smaller than a movie theatre, and watching it, mind you, only one step lower than if we were watching it from anywhere else in the house. My dad tried to explain the architectural connection between the word sunken and its recreational function, but like a lot of his lectures he soon digressed to a medical explanation, this one on transmitted diseases. He had undoubtedly been inspired by an article in “The Urological Monthly,” and his explanation became heavily peppered with medical terms, which were depressing and inappropriate for young audiences. When his carnal overtones stepped too far over the edge, my mom interrupted, sort of stepped up as it were, and put an end to his in-house medical conference.
“Ahem…John,” she interrupted looking up from her Life Magazine, “I think I’ve about heard enough on that subject. The kids don’t need to know about that yet.”
A few days later, the real information about our sunken living room came when my older brother Gary received his yearly World Almanac, circa 1964, which he read from cover to cover every year, including the copyright information and the glossary, both printed in a type size below the legal limit.
From the beginning of January, when the almanac arrived, through mid-December of the same year, Gary began a reading marathon that made him an enlightened scholar on almost every subject. He carried the book from room to room, reading as he went, bumping into objects as he went and blurting out his latest discovery. One year, when the almanac arrived with a corner bent, Gary had a meltdown and threatened to hit the mailman in the kneecaps the next time he arrived. The next day, as I watched him prepare for the ambush from our stadium-size picture window, Gary became distracted when he found the section on albatrosses… and let the mailman walk right on by!
Undeterred, as my brother continued to absorb the thick book like a sponge, he learned Major League batting averages, how to convert things to the metric system, and studied the sordid histories of Wild West characters, like maniac cowpokes who road bulls into thunderstorms and ate cactuses to stay alive. As Gary recited an ever-growing list of facts, I absorbed them for use in school to correct what my teachers were presenting in class. Not to digress but reminding a teacher in an English class that Edgar Allen Poe was a drug addict did not exactly endear me to the front row.
One morning, Gary brought his voluminous bible, the 1964 World Almanac, to the breakfast table, which offered a pleasant diversion from my father’s explanations of urine microbes. After carefully balancing the almanac so he could eat his Fruit Loops freely, Gary suddenly looked up and rather excitedly announced that, between the section on oceanographic anomalies and weather patterns, page 3,482, he had unearthed information on a new scientific theory called “The Greenhouse Effect.”
“According to the almanac,” he started, “you got gas rising from houses which blocks the sun and traps the heat inside everyone’s homes. Eventually, that gas will start to suffocate everything, even us.”
I don’t want to be trapped…” I whimpered, “I…I’ve collected almost all the box tops from my cereal and…”
“Oh, no. That’s just it!” Gary interrupted, “We are safe! We have a sunken living room! As long as we stay in the rec room, below sea level, we won’t get any gas at all. The guy who built the house must have known we could die from the heat and gas, and sunk part of the house down to save us. All we have to do is go down there, and we’ll be safe from the Greenhouse Effect.”
From across the table, I studied Gary’s face for truth. What I saw calmed me, the face and thick glasses of my brother eating Fruit Loops. He was the living, breathing authority on everything from peas to porcupines. Reassurance came over me like one of my dad’s medical lectures. I knew right then that our new house was safe from outside influences, even if it meant that I would need to plan hourly quarantines in the slightly sunken area of the rec room.
This was the beginning of my love affair with, and everything on the TV, my one stop shopping for recreation. It wasn’t long before I learned to live my life vicariously through television programs and know that I would not suffocate from some mysterious green gas, or that my flesh would not melt off my bones in the middle of the night. It was, for me, the dawning of a new day, a pivotal moment where I realized that all I had to do to be safe was to go low when others went high and watch hours and hours and hours of TV. I began to accept, even relish, that one single step down as a small but necessary pilgrimage to wisdom and survival. Mankind might go up in flames, my friends might all perish tragically, but in the sunken room I was safe and, other than the occasional trip to the frig for more snacks, happy.
So…as life began to settle down in our new home, my life was looking pretty good. With the peaceful drone of non-stop television filling our home, I found all my fantasies about an imaginary sunken space wither away. I was not suffocating, our house was Greenhouse safe, and even though I caught a slight whiff of gas now and then, I trained myself to hold my breath down our long hallway and through the kitchen until I made the final leap to the safe zone.
As if life could get any better, rumor outside the rec room was that my grandmother was coming to live with us all the way from Ohio, a state Gary noted from page 845 of the World Almanac was actually “good morning” in Japanese. To me, however, Grandma’s arrival simply meant a lot of sugar cookies, and I could say good morning to them all day long. I was in some good head space, down in my sunken shelter where the air was fresh, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with Elvis was on, and I was about to receive an endless supply of unnecessary sugar.
Tune in next week, for part two of Now Showing: 20,000 Leagues Under the Living Room. My grandmother’s arrival begins to bring out some of my most sunken behaviors, the inevitable effects of living too far below the earth’s surface, staring at an immovable box, and eating cookies three times a day.