It is the room in the basement of the only house he has ever known. The room opposite of the laundry room. The room that looks like a cavern where flannel-clad googly eyes teenage nerds from down the street would use to play Dungeons and Dragons in, clattering ten sided dice while vicariously traipsing over glens with dwarves battling battle-axes in an attempt to rescue the swaying haired tresses of scantily clad damsel and later, if one rolls high-enough, perhaps vicariously get laid.

He ambles down the stairs. He has ruffled auburn bangs that look like stage curtains. He is near-sighted only it is not diagnosed and everything is static and he will have to repeat first grade because the chalk board is am impressionist pond of plus signs that resemble crosses.

He descends into the vat of darkness. He is four fingers years old. His mother dressed him up in emerald tights and a green shirt and made a felt hat that looks like a  newspaper ship made out of green beans and shoes that curled up like eaves and he went trick-or-treating as Peter Pan. That Thanksgiving he innocuously exposed himself to his cousin behind her house, his penis, unsheathed, four times around the sun stiff, a horizontal mast as she giggled uncontrollably. Before unbuckling her Duke of hazards jeans and showing him hers.

He descends past the ghosts of catacombs. The furnace that was fed coal thirty years prior. He is walking. He has two younger sisters. Every night his father prays with him, working class apses exhumed in the late twenties, the year his house was built.

The bikes are parked in the basement. The house is on the corner. Last week someone severed the serpentine coil of the hose on the side of the house. His father, gardening in his undershirt, his father making end meets, teaching fourth graders, taking a bus to school, his father making ends meet but always tithing  to the church.
 


There are books. The witch of Blackbird pond. My side of the Mountain. Johnny Tremain.  A Light in the Forest. Books that my father taught to his sixth grade class at Beverly Manor in the now defunct Sunnyland, Illinois.  The books are scholastic, Troll book order, usually 20-30 of the same slim tome stacked on top of each other in an architectural slope, stalactites arching upwards like church steeples, spires of bound pages.

There is the rattle of the furnace which fifty years ago ran solely on coal. Dad tells me that the room where he keeps his books in was once used as the room to store heaps of coal for the house.

He is four years old.

Behind the furnace is a tenebrous gloaming, a narthex of emptiness , a passage where, sometimes late at night, I press down heavy in the center of my STAR WARS pajamas and think about taking my cousin and laying on top of her and pressing down and then giggling for no reason at all.

I am four years old.

From my four finger old periphery the room is dark and looks like a forest. There are no windows. The light bulb is dangling like a fresh suicide in the center of the room and needs to be given a yank for illumination to ensue.

The room has a dank, sometimes a wet papery smell attached to the interior.  There are heaps of Newberry awards: A wrinkle in Time, From the Mixed up files of Mrs.  Basil E. Frankweiler,  A light in the forest. A boy with bad seventy bangs with the words MY SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN pinned to the top in almost balloon like sentences.

I am four years old. Mom reads bible stories to me every night. Dad will descend to the cap of his knees and say prayers with me.




Some times when I wake up early in the morning, before the pink-blanket of dawn surfs in across the parents’ side of my house in ripples, when it is still dark with gentle hum outside and the grass is sweating and smells earthy and brand new, sometimes I sneak down stairs amongst the heaps of books and just smell them. Inhale their damp watery-cardboard odor and just ponder, as cartoon innocuous four year old can ponder, where these books have been.  I look at the covers. I flip open the center and not the continents of paragraph and ink. But mainly I wedge my nose into the center of each books and just inhale.


 At the top of the bookshelf lies a replica of a ship. Later, when I ask my father what sort of a ship it is Dad replies by saying that it is one of the ship that Columbus used when he sailed over here.


 I ask him the name. It sounds Hispanic. Like the piñata Dad made out of paper mache configured like a softball for my birthday tying it to the top of the tree above the pavilion in lower Bradley park, where I took a yellow bat and blind folded, swung, missing the first time and maybe even the second time before making contacting with the pendulum shaped object, shattering everything, candy blessing the earth, the high-pitched screams of little children.


 



Dad says the name of the ship again. I ask him why it is important.


He bends down and alights the mini-replica of the ship.

 He tells me that it brought us all here, in a way.