The Grange
The strangest place you’ve ever fallen asleep is…
My parents, being total squares, regularly celebrated this by going squaredancing on Saturday nights. When my sister and I were very young, they hired a babysitter while they went off to do their mysterious rituals for 5-6 hours on the other side of the peninsula. But as we got older, the ‘rents started dragging us with them.
The building they performed their nefarious dancing in, called The Grange, looked like an old church that had been converted to this public space, for people who required an uncarpeted floor to do their stuff. Select buildings in this city a decent hour’s drive away from my hometown had this same aura–mostly buildings made of cinderblocks and other materials of the 1920s, the bathrooms with the exposed pipes painted white. Speaking of paint, you could see the decades of coats slathered on most walls and pipes, making the original detail of the wall or pipe a little muted through the layers. Whenever I visit a rural community and come across a bathroom like that, I get a little nostalgic for that grange. Pardon the soliloque. *snickers*
My sister and I were usually bored at these dancing shindigs, and often sat in the “closet” to play with our brought toys, or did homework. The closet was this little alcove built into the front of the grange–perhaps a former consessions booth or somesuch. The grownups hung their coats in there, and my sister and I, the only children brought there, were left to sit on the floor in there and amuse ourselves. After hours of twangy country music and it getting close to midnight, my sister and I would get sufficiently bored enough to attempt sleep. We’d curl up on our parents’ coats and the scratchy wool blanket from the car, and we’d crash the heck out. Sometimes we’d wake up whenever an elderly grownup wandered in to procure something from this large closet, and our parents would nudge us to give us a little food from the weekly excuse for a potluck.
The grownups would dance first, finish with a big communal meal, and then leave for home. I remember waking up confused, my dad trying to lift me to carry me to the car, and me wondering where everyone had gone, why it smelled like food and why we never saw it being served. For some reason, my parents never thought it wise to let us see the basement, not until we were in our early teens and they knew us to be mannered enough not to pick at the offerings before the crowd descended the rickety stairs for their meal.
But yeah, one of the weirdest places my sister and I slept, in the back of a coat closet in a public building.
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Challenge yourself to Holidailies 2009 by writing one entry each day in December.
