The Boys in the Basement

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

Now that I’ve lived awhile, I recognize that parents in every generation despair about some popular cultural trend in which their teenagers are involved. When I was young, we were all turning into degenerates because of Elvis’s influence. Although to be fair, we did get considerable exercise as a result of those outrageous gyrations. Today my children worry about the inordinate number of hours my grandsons choose to spend playing video games. I’ve heard them commiserate that their kids will still be living in the basement at home playing games when they are 30.

Good news. Things may not be as bad as they fear.

My husband has grown out of his garage a number of times over the years. He admits to owning at least “one of everything ever thrown away.” (In the old days before Jordan Landfill cracked down on its policies, he often brought home more than he dumped.) His solution to his storage problem was to build a shed in our back yard. A Two-Story Storage Shed. Since our house in Kearns was right on the edge of the steep hill which rolls off the Oquirrh Mountains and into the Salt Lake Valley, I objected. A Taj Mahal shed would destroy the spectacular view off my deck.  We compromised. He’d build a shed–with a basement.

My brother came up from Las Vegas to spend a few days and help him. They rented a backhoe, marked the walls with stakes and string, and one fine Saturday morning, they began to dig. My husband had two undergraduate degrees—both a BA and a BS; my brother was just finishing a master’s. They were confident they could handle any problem that arose–until they drove that backhoe into yard and tried to dig the first shovelful of dirt. It took them exactly one-and-a-half hours to transfer that first shovelful to the wheelbarrow. At that rate, I figured the shed would be finished about the time Son #6 graduated from college.

Several of those sons were watching with interest the enterprise going on in the backyard. Finally, Son #1 ambled down the stairs off the deck and informed his dad and his uncle that he could do a better job–a whole lot faster. Some fairly heated discussion occurred which involved a good deal of animated gesturing. I was washing dishes and the time, and I must admit to grinning, when from out the kitchen window, I saw Son #1 climb into the machine and began excavation. Within five minutes dirt was flying, and the backhoe was smoothing lifting dry earth and transferring it into wheelbarrows–which the well-educated adults were manning. (Not without some serious visible displeasure, however.)

Turns out that Son #1 (18 years-old) had spent a lot of time with a joystick; so much time, in fact, that he was a finalist when the 1990 World Nintendo Championships rolled through Salt Lake. He had taken Son #6 (who was all of 6 years-old) with him because Son #6 had proven to be a formidable opponent in the family room tournaments after their dad, a computer software designer, brought home a new-fangled Atari game machine and introduced his sons to Super Mario. Son #6, who was thrilled to go with his brother to the tournament, took third place for the under 14 age-category!

Son #1 had no trouble at all with the joystick on the backhoe. He maneuvered it with the same skill his dad used to weld a hammer. But after a couple of hours of digging a hole, transferring its contents to a wheelbarrow, and doing it again 10,00 times, Son #1 got bored. He had better things to do, so he motioned Son #6 to take over. The adult males were outraged. Son #6 had barely started elementary school. He couldn’t be trusted with a machine worth thousands of dollars! But competence won out, and Son #6 finished the job while his dad and his uncle took massive doses of Ibuprofen for their aching shoulders and backs—clear evidence that a fancy framed diploma doesn’t always cut it when there’s “real” work to be done.

(PS: Son #1 married a girl whose father owns a shed with a basement–only the second one we’ve ever heard of. It’s a frightening genetic tendency on both sides of his children’s family history.)