Imagining growing up without a basement in Phoenix, Arizona


I pride myself on having a pretty good imagination, but since I didn't grow up in Phoenix, it's often difficult for me to imagine how kids could grow up there. I've had it explained to me that kids would play in the summer, even when it was over 100 degrees, and although I can stretch my imagination that far, every once in a while I try to imagine growing up without a basement, and I'm stuck.

If you yourself grew up without a basement in your house, I'll see if I can explain how ordinary they were to me growing up in Minneapolis. All of the houses had a basement. It's been explained to me that it's a necessity when building a house where it gets so cold, you can't just plop it down on the dirt like you can in Phoenix. Yes, I know some houses in Phoenix have basements, but they're rare, and they're a luxury. In Minneapolis, it was a given.

A basement in a house is the same as a story, except that usually they're not quite as finished. It depends on the homeowner - my dad fixed up half of the basement to be pretty livable, at least for kids to play, and the other half was his workbench, with a concrete floor, the furnace, stuff like that. So, if you look at it that way, even the two-story houses in my neighborhood were actually three stories (one being underground and kinda ratty).

OK, so I'm supposed to be imagining growing up in Phoenix - that is, without a basement. My little mind boggles. Yes, we kids had a bedroom upstairs, and we spent some time, eating, on the ground floor, and we even got to be in the living room on Christmas. But mostly we slept in our rooms and played in the basement. The most important point here is that we were separated from the grownups, which I never really liked, and still really don't. The grownups wanted peace and quiet, and chairs to read in, or do knitting, and we kids (I had three brothers) wanted to romp around like half-crazed monkeys all of the time. I can only assume that Phoenician children were better behaved.

I suppose that you could compare our basement in Minneapolis to "family rooms" in Phoenix houses. I've seen them, and they allow mom and dad to keep an eye on the kids. My brothers and I were down in the basement, wrestling around, making noise, and while there wasn't a door, it was pretty insulated from where the grownups were. You know, reading books, knitting. My parents had one of those "hi-fi" radios and played that sleepy "Lawrence Welk" music up there.

OK, I give up. I just can't imagine being under the eyes of the grownups all of the time. As I recall, one of the main goals for my brothers and I was to jump out unexpectedly and punch each other in the arm. Not to mention saying the dumbest things possible, and making the ugliest faces that we could at each other. And then we'd put a hand under our armpit to make the noise of... oh, never mind.

I love Phoenix, but I can't say that I'll ever really understand it.
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