Funny thing about the Friday Five: I thought the questions were pretty dumb and pointless this week, yeah, so what, but it is a writing prompt, so, okay, it's a place to start.
It's a memory prompt, too. Now that I've been reading all of your Friday Fives, I've got toilet paper on the brain.
First, it was Quilted Northern. The brand I couldn't remember, that we used until, like, five minutes ago, with blue on the package and a picture of a baby. I couldn't think of it on Friday. Quilted Northern.
l-empress says that she buys toilet paper by the case at Costco. I'm guessing this is the kind that comes individually wrapped in paper, each roll. Maybe, maybe not.
It made me think of the crawlspace.
My family moved to your basic split-level in the suburbs when I was eight; before that, we lived in a garden apartment, where everybody else's daddy was a veteran, too, either from World War II, like mine, or from Korea. We moved to the split in 1961. I had never seen a house anything like it. All my relatives either lived in apartments in the Bronx (mother's side) or old houses near Cape Cod (dad's). A split-level was just a mystery to me, but it afforded some good exploring possibilities.
On the lowest level, basement, if you will, was a 1950s knotty-pine den, with about a dozen little closets and cubbies built in here and there. On one wall there was a door, no more than three feet high, carved right out of the knotty pine, so that you might not even see it there. There was a little black handle, like you might see on a cabinet front. I opened the door, and inside there was ... a room.
It was a tiny room; at eight, I could barely stand if I ducked my head down from the shoulders. It had a plank-wooden floor, and walls, and the ceiling was like little rafters. Shirl and Jack said it was the crawlspace.
I didn't know that any house with space under the main floor that's not high enough to stand calls it a crawlspace. And there was a real crawlspace under the whole first floor of our house, not just this little room carved into it. I thought crawlspace meant specifically this room, or this kind or room, the way bathroom means the place you wash and use the toilet.
I wanted it to be my room. I always liked to find little spaces to squeeze into and hide, and call my room, since I'd never had a room of my own, and even now, in the new house, the room that was supposed to be mine was going to Grandma instead, which really was just fine with me. I would have slept in the backyard if it meant any of my grandparents would come to live with us. They didn't let me sleep in the crawlspace, of course, except once; I shared my sister's room until grandma moved back to Massachusetts. I liked to play in the crawlspace, though: house, wagon train, outer space. It was little and cozy and I loved it. I put down a carpet remnant, and plugged in the really old TV they were storing there. I remember that I watched the very first episodes of The Time Tunnel and Gilligan's Island in the crawlspace with OldFriend.
It was a store-room, of course. Most split-levels, unless they've been expanded somehow, have neither a real basement nor a real attic, at least not one that you can get to. We had two attics, actually, one over each part of the house. Neither one had a floor, just rafters, and you could only get into them through hatchways in the ceiling of a closet. So we either had to take everything out of the linen closet, including the shelves, or everything out of my mother's closet, including the zillions of meticulously labeled shoe boxes. We stored everything in the crawlspace.
Every few years, Jack would build an addition onto the crawlspace. I swear this is the truth. He would knock out one of the walls, expand the floor out in that direction, and put up a new wall. Over the years, the crawlspace quintupled in size. Not in height, of course. He was putting more usable storage space into what was otherwise the icky, basement-y real crawlspace. Wherever he built, he put more shelves.
Our luggage was there, and the 8 mm movie projector, as well as the movies, in a box. There were boxes and boxes, probably all the same stuff we found when we cleaned out his apartment in February. There were unused dishes and serving pieces.
And, at any given moment, there were about a hundred rolls of toilet paper, Scot tissue, single-ply, each individually wrapped in paper. These were generally being kept company by three or four cases of BumbleBee tuna fish cans, more light-bulbs than the human mind can conceive, and, always, about two dozen boxes of Broil-a-Foil, which are disposable broiling trays with ridges molded into them.
My father had taken on the grocery shopping when my mother went back to work, and it became his hobby. He adored Shop-Rite, and was The King of All the Bargain Shoppers. He could not resist a good buy, but only when it was on something he knew we would certainly need and use in the future.
Toilet paper. Tuna fish. Light bulbs. Broil-a-Foil.
The crawlspace was the big draw on the house tour. When anybody new came to visit ("And would you like to see the house?") they all got to peek into the crawlspace, at the rolls of toilet paper lined up like neat little soldiers. Adventurous -- small -- visitors would gamely hunker down and duck walk inside. By this time, Jack could barely get through the little crawlspace door, but he did so after every shopping trip, replenishing his supplies. We knew to take toilet paper from one end, not the other. He need to keep his stock rotated.
As I put in my Friday Five, what I got in my inheritance from him this past February was not Scot tissue, individually wrapped, but Charmin. A whole lot of Charmin, maybe like 50 rolls, but in big multi-packs. He had moved up to double-ply. My parents had moved out of their house about ten years ago, so no more crawlspace, just stacks of Charmin in the closet of the apartment's spare bedroom. He hardly ate tuna anymore, and he never broiled anything. My sister and I split the half-dozen light bulbs.
I loved the crawlspace; I felt so safe and happy there. Maybe it was the security of knowing I was never going to run out of toilet paper. Maybe it was knowing that I was safe in a little wooden cocoon that my daddy had built for me with his own hands.
Prompt me. You never know what you'll get.
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I'm watching Friends on DVD
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