How I came to be in the favorite
part of my boyhood home remains a mystery, but the basement looked exactly as I
remember it. A cavernous, liberating space with a ping-pong table and two steel
support poles painted fire-engine red, speckled asbestos floor tiles and
concrete walls painted a cheery yellow. Travel posters graced the walls at
eight-foot intervals along the west side, glued in place with wallpaper paste
by my father decades before. The posters depicted places my parents had never
visited—Mexico, Spain, Paris, Rome. Cliché vistas of the Arc de Triomphe, a
bullfight and the tower of Pisa. We had never traveled as a family beyond the
Wisconsin Dells, so these windows to the world made me smile, but saddened me
to think of all the unrealized adventures that had been dreamt in this playful
subterranean space.
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