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.
History Adventuring on Patreon

 Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more