I've been spending a lot of time in the basement lately. Most of the time, I am down there at the request of my family but over the last couple weeks, as reported in this space the day after Labor Day, I have been part of the toy-sorting, book-piling, paper-tossing, baby-box-adding crew. Being in the basement takes me back to the house I grew up in from age six through high school. We called what we had a "basement" but it was really a "cellar." Cold...damp...dank...musty. The same adjectives used to describe me in my Senior Yearbook. The cellar had one of those slanted exterior doors you see in old movies when people are trying to get out of the way of a cyclone. Once it came in very handy. We had a Peeping Tom who, when he heard me slam the outside door, took off running, tripped over the cellar door and wiped out. I spent the next several days looking for bloody shins.

As a kid, I always thought our cellar had money-making potential. For awhile I tried to use it to create and market stamps...the kind you push into an ink pad and then on paper. One of my brothers had a stamp-making kit that he'd out-grown so I appropriated it. Unfortunately, a number of the letters were missing and there is not much of a market for " op Secre !" stamps in a little Wisconsin town. Another time, a friend of mine and I decided to turn the space into a haunted house and charge a quarter per visit. We used the aforementioned stamp kit to make the " icke s." My brothers' band had one of those four-color, light wheels so we set that up...hung some sheets around like ghosts, most looking like Casper after a visit to Jenny Craig...added some music and then hid down there, waiting to jump out and scare people. The cellar had two rooms, through which we put up blankets to replicate hallways. Our haunted house got very little business for two reasons. Most of the neighborhood kids had cellars of their own and weren't particularly scared of going in mine plus, we were trying to sell Halloween fright in the middle of April. For some reason I recall our second-grade teacher, who didn't even live in the neighborhood, making a special effort to visit. I think she was encouraging our entrepreneurial efforts or it was an obvious indictment of the lack of recreational opportunities for young, singles in our town. (I shudder to think what she would have done if we'd opened a tattoo parlor. "I'd like you boys to spell out this week's spelling list...printing and in cursive.") For whatever reason, there she was...a very proper young lady willing to shell out 25 cents for a walk on the wild side. I have to say it did inhibit our performances as ghouls. We had created this mayhem with other kids in mind, but if your teacher is your first customer, can your minister be far behind? If our friends came in we were prepared to actually pounce on them, hold them down and threaten the most awful stuff! But you just didn't pounce on, hold or threaten your second-grade teacher. So, after a half-hearted "uhhh...Boo..." our teacher was out the door and we were out of the haunted house business.

As a teenager, I thought I'd turn the cellar into a work-out room but once I'd dragged our rusty old free-weight set down there, I was too winded to use them. I also tried to make it into a "bachelor pad" with lava lamps, strings of beads hanging in the doorway and a transistor radio. Unfortunately, I could never get any girl to even talk to me, let alone visit my swinging locale. It was probably a lost cause anyway since the radio only picked up farm reports. It's hard to make your move to the soulful sounds of "barrows and gilts are up a half-cent but soybeans are taking a beating. Now, this word from home extension agent Molly Mikowsky on how to make attractive flower pots from those empty milk cartons." Even with all those failed efforts, I still think that old cellar could've been something special. As it turned out, we mostly put canned goods down there and, occasionally, our mother, when the weather got treacherous.

Our current house does not have a cellar but it is not a "finished-off" basement either. When we moved in, we painted the walls bright yellow to simulate the outdoors and added a dehumidifier to simulate something other than a basement. We let the kids pick out the carpet remnant for the floor and they chose a chunk a bowling alley had rejected. That is the absolute truth. It is mostly black with red, yellow, pink and blue splotches of color which, supposedly, glow if you use a black light. Now, I know we don't call them "bowling alleys" anymore. They are Family Recreation and Fun Centers! But, when I grew up there was nothing wrong with the phrase "bowling alley." Ours was the MidWay Lanes operated by a man called Norb...short for Norbert, I think. (Norb was not such an odd name for our village. For example, the best chicken in town came from a guy called Stub. I don't know why he was called that and I never saw fit to ask.) It was downstairs...in the basement, to continue my theme...of the movie theater, called the MidWay Theater. During a war-picture, action movie or raucous Jerry Lewis comedy the bowling noises were not a problem but for romantic stuff it could be unsettling. When our town got the movie Love Story everyone thought Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw must have serious digestive disorders. Love meant never having to say "Excuse me."

Meanwhile back in our basement...it is usable. There's TV down there...some sort of video game...a ping-pong table. Still, our kids keep saying "It would be so cool if we had real walls and plush carpet and a big-screen TV and a pool table and a mini-fridge and....and...and...and..." I told them that finishing off the basement is part of our future plans, about eight years down the road. Just about the time they are all out of the house and on their own. They thought this rather unfair. So, I offered to to fix it up in about five years, meaning, at least, the youngest one would get to enjoy it, since, at age ten, being the only non-teen, he is still occasionally on my side. That also met resistance.

The fact is, with the way things tend to go nowadays, some or all of the kids may be returning to the nest for awhile after college, about when we'd actually be able to swing turning the basement into a family room. So, I've decided that's fine but they will have to pay 25 cents to visit and I can tell them where to get the " icke s."