Basement Adventures

While Michael was taking apart grocery bags to create pads of drawing paper in Three Rivers, Michigan; I was exploring the basement of my family home in Muskego, Wisconsin. Alongside the usual storage boxes and laundry equipment, there were enormous round cardboard storage barrels, chest-high and filled with all kinds of equipment for yard work and sports. Others were filled with old clothes.

The basement was as irresistible to me as a closet is to a cat. I spent many hot muggy summer afternoons in the cool basement digging through boxes and storage barrels. Fortunately for me, my mother was a pack rat. There was a lot for a nine-year-old to explore. Among the many papers, letters, and receipts; I found a cancelled check made out to Misericordia Hospital in Milwaukee for labor and delivery services.
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Some of the most intense experiences of my childhood occurred down there. My older sister, Cathy, took in an unusually plump stray cat and offered it shelter in the basement. After several weeks, it gave birth to a litter of kittens, just a few yards away from the washer and dryer. A few weeks after giving birth, Mom Cat decided she had too many kittens and tried to euthanize one by dropping it into one of the enormous cardboard storage barrels. We followed the faint mews, fished the runt out of the barrel, and hand fed him for the next few weeks.

During many Octobers, I dug through those old storage barrels, and put together several oddball pieces of clothing to create my Halloween costume.

Some of the most terrifying experiences of my life occurred in that basement, sitting down there in dim light as a tornado raged over our heads. Three tornadoes in two years, each time, our house was spared. Others were not.
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But the real treasure in the basement was the most deeply hidden. Poking out from behind those dozen or so storage barrels was a black metal trunk with a hinged lid and leather straps and handles. Plastered with train station stickers from Milwaukee, Fargo, Chicago…this was evidence of the far flung and exciting travels of my mother’s youth.

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Inside that trunk, I found a typewriter. Not an electric one, but a manual typewriter. When Mark Twain advised aspiring writers to cease submitting longhand manuscripts and switch to the new typewriting machines, he was probably sitting at a typewriter identical to the one I had discovered in the basement.

It was a severe-looking black metal box. The keys were round and sepia-toned with stern black letters printed on each one. When I struck a key, I could see the cold metal arm rise up out of the bowels of the typewriter and hit the paper on the roll. If I did not hit the key with a lot of force, the letter would be very faint. I assumed that secretaries must have strong hands. I had to work so hard at hitting the key that my fingers often slipped down between the keys. I repeatedly yanked my fingers up out of the keyboard and tried again.

While another nine-year-old would have grabbed a baseball bat or fishing poll from one of the cardboard barrels; I was fascinated by the typewriter. I was discovering that I wanted to write. Pushing words out of myself and getting them out into the world was a visceral need, like going outdoors for sunlight and fresh air. I wanted to be a writer.

I was determined to create my own books. I started writing poetry and created book covers out of construction paper. Each cover was unique, the title and cover illustration done with crayon. Between the covers were several pages of plain white typing paper, some with poems typed and others hand written when I became frustrated with the cranky old typewriter. The “book” binding was a series of staples.

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Since then, writing has been the straight line running through decades of my life. Jobs, relationships, a college degree, and various adventures and misadventures have zigzagged across that line. As a contributing writer for Bay Area Business Woman, I wrote approximately fifty feature or cover stories. I also wrote and edited copy for websites, brochures, newsletters, and other advertising pieces for micro-businesses in the Bay Area. I wrote and self-published two books, Chocolate and Cabernet, a novel; and Tales of the Living Room Warrior, an eight-part fable. Michael did the cover design and page layout for both books and illustrated Tales. It was due to his talent at computer graphics that I was able to see both books published.

While I was writing and earning part of my income at it, I also worked at the San Francisco offices of two nonprofits, sold symphony and theater tickets on commission, and took on assignments as a companion to elderly people like Gladys. I also cleaned houses, lots of houses. I learned how to juggle several different spheres of activity and balance multiple obligations and responsibilities while carving out time for my ongoing need to write.

When I met Michael, we shared a passion for stories - telling stories, reading them, and watching them on screen. Michael introduced me to the pleasures of reading comics, graphic novels, and several forms of genre fiction. I began to realize that fantasy, science fiction, and other genre leant themselves to rich world-building and could unleash the power of the writer’s imagination.

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This website and ongoing blog comes from the intersection of our lives and talents. If our lives had unfolded the way we meant them to, Michael would have continued teaching web design at Silicon Valley College until his retirement. He would have finished several more stories and a lot of artwork. And he would’ve continued noodling around with fonts and graphics to create unusual title lines and lettering effects. No doubt, he would have come up with a home page for this website featuring his own handcrafted fonts with drop shadows, eye-popping color combos and animation moving those letters and shadows in surprising ways.

But our lives zigzagged in ways neither of us could’ve anticipated. The BratCat website and blog will maintain its focus on storytelling, art, writing, and the creative process. But it will now also include cancer, hope, grief - and love.

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