Dad Took Over My Hiding Place

I was not a hermit. We boys in the neighborhood regularly played softball, basketball, and football, and except during the worst days of winter, we rode our bicycles around town. However, with that being said, I needed time for myself (and I still do.) Like other boys, I liked sports, movies, and dances, but quiet time with a good book was also important.

The perfect hideout for me was the fruit cellar. Amid the smell of preserves, I would sit for hours on a delapidated chair, reading books I had borrowed from the library. Hardly anyone else came into the room, so it was a perfect “get away” spot. (During my “super hero phase, I hid my costume there.)

Out of necessity, I have owned a library card from an early age. On Sundays, we'd visit some very old people (Now they seem like kids) who, to me at the time, seemed extremely boring. Moreover, we sometimes stayed at those boring places for five or six hours at a time.

Therefore, I persuaded Mom to take me to the local library. The plan was to bring along a good book whenever we visited boring places, so that I would have something positive to do. The first book I took with me was Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

After socializing for a half hour or so, I went to the car and proceeded to read, believing I'd get a few chapters in before the “boss” decided to head home. Surprisingly, I read the book from cover to cover but still had to wait another hour before we left. After that, I brought along two books.

A year or so later, I was forced out of my fruit cellar reading center. Someone gave Dad a recipe for homemade beer, but evidently, they had listed too much sugar. Instead of beer, Dad had inadvertently invented his own rocket fuel.

One could be sleeping, watching TV, eating dinner, or reading the newspaper when a loud explosion, sounding much like a rocket attack, reverberated throughout the house. After such an attack, my secret reading room, from ceiling to floor, was covered with a strong-smelling brew. The beer was so potent that it ate the paint from the floor. Shards of glass were embedded in the walls and ceiling.

No longer could I use the room. During an attack, one could sustain serious injuries or perhaps could even be killed.

For four months, all but one of the beer bottles exploded. With a towel in hand, Dad retrieved the last bottle, bringing it upstairs to the kitchen. There, he opened it. A dark blue cloud escaped, along with a pungent odor. He gave me one sip. It burned my throat on the way down, and continued to do so while it sat gurgling in my stomach. “Mountain Dew” had nothing on this concoction.

The good news was that Dad never attempted to make another batch of home brew, so after the last bottle was consumed, I was able to move my reading quarters back to the fruit cellar. However, this arrangement didn't last long.

For his next adventure, Dad began making coleslaw. Each year, he would slice a few inches off my only good baseball bat before using it to smash the ingredients into a pulp. After five years of slaw-making, my bat was useful only for a two-year-old.

Unfortunately, Dad stored the big crocks of coleslaw in the fruit cellar. I tried reading in the cellar, but the smell was overwhelming. In desperation, I once tried nose plugs, but the smell was still suffocating, to say the least.

My next reading area was in the great outdoors. When good weather prevailed, I'd sit under a large tree in a wooded area behind our garage. The seating was uncomfortable, and at times the mosquitoes feasted upon me, but at least I didn't have to worry about flying shards of glass and stinky coleslaw.

On numerous occasions, our son heard the story about Grandpa's coleslaw operation.. When he was old enough to play baseball, he requested a glove and a bat. Specifically, he asked for a metal bat, just in case his grandfather decided to once again go into the coleslaw business.