Oh yes. That’s very familiar. Once I came home from a trip to Toronto to discover the downstairs bathroom and half the kitchen demolished.
My family did the same thing! I only noticed after a long time that it was a bit peculiar. Actually, the neighbours did as well – for all I know, it might have been the custom in that neighbourhood. But when we moved to a house that didn’t have a side door, they simply used that without any comment.
Despite having very intense jobs, my parents always cooked from scratch. I mean, not every night; they cooked lots of things ahead of time and froze them, and it was often relatively simple; but we scarcely ever bought prepared meals. They also pretty much always made time for family dinner with at least one of them. I never realized that there were lots of families who simply don’t do these things. (Also, now that I live by myself, I have no idea how they got the energy to work at jobs way more intense than mine and still have the wherewithal to cook like that. I guess they’re just more type A than I am.)
Bars aren’t that unusual. My cousin’s father built a small pub in their basement (circa 1975), complete with two old church pews for seating, mirrors with schooners on them, and an antique whiskey barrel in the corner with an antique saddle on it. At one point it had swinging saloon doors, but he took them down because he wanted “English pub” and the doors made it look too “old west”. It was really quite amazing! My partner’s father had a basement pub, a friend of mine just bought a bungalow that had a bar in the basement, a former co-worker of mine built one in his basement too, and my neighbour in my home town had one really awful one in the corner of his living room, with a leather bar that looked like it came from a strip club. Now that I think of it, all of the basement bars that I know about were built by homeowners with English, Scottish, or Irish backgrounds. So perhaps it’s a cultural thing, like the way everyone in my Italian ex’s very Italian neighbourhood had two kitchens. (Except for the one discovered in my friend’s bungalow. We don’t know anything about the owners.)
We also had two refrigerators. My family owned one and when we moved to a rental house that already had the kitchen utilities, we put the old fridge in the basement.
Reading this makes me appreciate my grandparents who insisted we put a hand-pump in the well along with the electric pump. When the electricity was cut from storms and such, all the neighbors came to our house with the buckets and bottles. We kids took turns pumping the water out and thought it was a fun novelty. It gave us strong arm muscles too. I didn’t really realize that having an old-fashioned hand pump was unusual.
This is exactly my experience. We all use the side door (because that’s where the laundry room is, so it’s covered with linoleum and easy to clean up after dirty shoes). Some select few very close family friends know us well enough to use the side door, but everyone else uses the front door.
Hunch: the people who use the side door instead of the front, is your side door closer to where you park your car than the front door is? My family has always done the same, and that’s why.
We had a rotary phone until the mid-1990s. I wondered why most people only had to push buttons to call people, but we had to turn that pesky wheel thing.
On the other hand, my dad was one of the first people to have a personal computer, so we generally had multiple computers when I was growing up. None of our friends had computers then, and it was only like 1992, not the late 1970s or anything.
My dad was in the Air Force so we moved a lot, and I was surprised that most people stay in the same place for years and years. Also, I was an only child and I didn’t realize how uncommon that was.
Oh my, this brought back some memories for me! I fell out several times by leaning on the door handles. This was in the late 60s, early 70s.
We were very poor, too. I can remember washing the same pair of socks out at night to wear to school the next day. They were knee socks held up by green rubber bands from the newspaper. Didn’t have a washing machine or dryer back then. My dad sure could buy his beer and cigarettes, though. I can’t remember the number of times he’d throw his still lit cigarette stubs on the ground and we’d step on them with our bare feet in the summer.
I had a really strange and difficult childhood. My father was a total, raving nut job. He worked shift work for a lumber company - 7 days of 7am-3pm, 7 days of 3pm-11pm, 7 days of 11pm to 7am. We rejoiced when he worked the 3pm-11pm shift. He was gone by the time we got home from school and we’d be gone to bed by the time he got home from work. Yippee! Otherwise we spent all of our time trying to stay out of his way.
There were four kids, me the youngest. We couldn’t watch TV when he was home. We couldn’t go near the bathroom if he was getting ready for work. Us girls had to keep a jar in our bedroom to pee in. I can still see him sitting on the side of his bed, drinking coffee and screaming “Don’t go in that bathroom. I gotta go to work soon!” if any of us just walked by the doorway of the bathroom on the way to our bedroom. Mother would start warning us “I’m getting ready to wake daddy up.Better go to the bathroom.”
When we were little, he used to walk around in his boxer shorts all the time, accusing us (ages 6 and 11) of looking at his wanker. Sick bastard’s dead now. Wonder where he is now? HELL maybe?
On the flip side, my poor Mother was a gentle and kind soul, her mother was a teacher and her dad a carpenter. How on earth she got mixed up with a monster like him, I’ll never know. My poor, poor Mother. I cry sometimes when I think back to what she went through. She was such a sweet person and he seemed to love to torture her. I really don’t know how we all made it through our childhood without becoming stark raving lunatics ourselves.
Anyway, I was about 13 before I realized that not all daddy’s were like mine. We were so timid, we never really had any friends outside of school so we had nothing to compare him to.
Every wedding I’ve gone to in my life has had “entertainment” provided by my grandfather. The “entertainment” is the NYPD Emerald Society Pipes and Drums. It wasn’t until recently that I realized how special that is.
It took me a while to figure out that most other kids weren’t being taken to aura readers, astrologers and past-life regression specialists.
I still have a tape made when I was five of a session with an astrologer, trying to explain the zodiac and the different ‘houses’ and where all my planets were, and a report from the aura reader confirming I was a genuine, pedigree indigo child.
