For some reason sleeping on a cold cement floor is an important event in my life. I don’t understand why I remember it as an event. What I do remember is the event itself and how it affected me then and later on. The memory of how it all started is gone and I don’t remember some of the details. What I do remember is that I was still a child of probably 6 or 7 years old.
It’s hard to recreate something from your childhood when memories get all mixed up with other past experiences, hurts and feelings. I know it was traumatic because even though I don’t remember how it started, I remember vividly 60 some years later how it felt. I know it began with some kind of punishment or reprimand. Maybe it was harsh words as I don’t remember being hit except for one time.
Anyway, we had two bedrooms in the basement with stucco walls and hardwood floors that Dad installed sometime when I was little. One bedroom was on the front of the house and one was on the back. The back bedroom was where I slept for as long as my oldest sister, Joyce, was home. She and Velna (number two sister) shared the front bedroom until Joyce got married in July of 1948 (I was almost 10 years old by then). Frank (my brother) and I shared the back room. I slept in a metal double bed with Grandma Lythgoe’s heavy tied quilt on top. The quilt was warm but not pretty. Frank had metal bunk beds with sagging metal springs where he slept.
Between the rooms was a laundry room with cement floors and walls. It had a sloping floor with a drain in the middle. Every Monday morning Mother washed with the Maytag ringer washer and rinsed in two tubs that she filled from a spigot on the wall with two hoses. One tub always had bluing in it to make the whites whiter. Off to the side of the laundry room was what we called the furnace room. At some point the heat for the house had been converted from coal to gas because behind the furnace was a very ugly coal room. It had a wooden shoot with a small metal covered opening to the outside. Coal had been unloaded directly into the room through the opening and down the shoot. The coal room was now used for storage but I was almost afraid to go in there—it was so dark and awful. The furnace room had some tools and other junk in it. Later Dad put a small sink, a metal shower and a toilet in the furnace room to help accommodate a family of six—including an adolescent (Velna) and a teenager (Joyce) besides Frank and me.
At the time of my event the furnace room was a dark place with a huge old furnace and an old open flame water heater.
What happened? I don’t know. I know it was late afternoon or early evening and I went to the basement to get away. I remember going to bed and just laying there. It was cold downstairs. I remember a small gas stove outside the front bedroom’s door but it didn’t give much heat. The big furnace only had one flue which sent heat to the floor grill in the upstairs hall.
It must have been late when I got up because everyone had gone to bed, but I was still awake. I remember feeling sad. Nobody came down to see how I was or to talk to me. I know I wanted something from somebody. But, that was not going to happen. I wanted to run away so they would miss me. Finally, I went into the furnace room and lay down on the bare cement floor. I remember thinking that someone would surely come and see I was not in bed and find me there in the furnace room. I had no blanket or pillow, only the cold floor. I was miserable.
Well, I wasn’t found until morning. I slept on the cold cement floor all night without anyone finding me. I learned that night that nobody loved me. I believed that if anyone cared about me they would have known I was missing and tried to find me. I needed someone to care about me. I didn’t really feel loved until I found Wally when I was 17. He made up for everything—I could hardly believe he could love me as I didn’t know I was loveable. As a child, I was taken care of but not loved (so it seemed to me). Now I know that attention doesn’t necessarily mean you are loved. But, it sure would have helped that night when I slept on the cold cement floor in the furnace room.
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