Stairs

Stairs are ubiquitous but unique.  Some are strictly functional while others are primarily artistic.  Sometimes, stairs are a nuisance.  When in a hurry, it isn’t uncommon to see someone jump to the floor, skipping the last stair or two. To a home with a family, stairs can be entertainment for the children and fearsome to the parents as the stairs serve as potential energy inviting all sorts of experiments.

What goes down stairs alone and in pairs and makes that slinkety sound?  A spring, a spring, a marvelous thing, everyone knows it’s a slinky.

I was raised in a home with stairs.  I played all sorts of games on stairs.  I would run up stairs skipping every other one.  I would run funny patterns on stairs going up against the wall on the right or jumping from the right side to the left side never stepping in the middle.  When playing ball, I found that the stairs were the best teammate ever.  They could give you grounder practice if you were playing with a baseball or return a pass when you were playing basketball.  My stairs were consistent, always passing the ball back and I didn’t ever need to chase a bad pass.  I would practice my basketball passes to the first stair, the second stair, the third stair, all the way up to the top step; except when I messed up and passed to the seventh stair before the sixth stair.  Then I would have to start over.

I remember the day a new upright freezer was delivered to the house.  The only place where we had room for the freezer was in a remote corner of the basement.  Once the freezer was in place, the movers were preparing to remove the box. I didn’t want them to take the box away. I begged for the box to stay, I pleaded for the box to stay.  I recruited my sister to join the groveling.  Mom relented and with the box fitting snuggly between the walls, the stairs suddenly became a slippery slide and a steep mountain slope to climb. 

Stairs have always been slides.  My children figured out that slippery nylon sleeping bags increase the speed and enhance the thrill of going down stairs.  They slid down the stairs feet first, and head first. They slid solo in the bag and teamed up with each other.  Each ride down elicited the giggles of glee and screams of joy with changing pitches of little voices as each step bump was crossed.

Stairs have so much excitement about them with new and unique opportunities to the creative.  Or the bored.  Boredom was my problem one day.  I was seven or eight years old and I don’t remember any of my other seven siblings being in the house to play with me.  I was at the bottom of the stairs trying to figure out what to do.  I stood on the bottom step and jumped down.  Then I climbed to the second step and jumped to the bottom again.  An idea struck like a flash of lighting.  My mind discovered a new game.  Climbing one step at a time, I would jump from each successively higher step to the bottom, until I had jumped from the top step.

To make this new game official, I would have to start over.  Back to the first step.  Jump.  Land. 

Second step. Jump. Land. 

Third step.  Jump. Land.  “Oof.  That almost hurt.  I need something to soften my landing.”  I searched the basement and found a mattress cushion from a baby crib.  “That will do.”  I drug it over to the base of the stairs.

Fourth Step.  Jump.  Land. “Soft. That’s better.  But truthfully this is getting boring.  I’ll just go to the top step and jump and be done with this game.”

My father was an architectural engineer.  The architect title meant that he could design buildings.  The engineer title meant that his designs were more functional and less form.   More functional describes the house in which I was raised.  The house was a rectangular box.  Everything was divided along the centerline and no room crossed the center line. The front of the house had a living room with two bedrooms connected by a hall.  The hall had cabinets and drawers for storage which was right in line with the closets of the two bedrooms. Function demands storage.

The back of the house had a dining room, kitchen and master bedroom. Squeezed in between the kitchen and master bedroom were stairs and a master bathroom.  The stairs led down to the basement in one direction and out the door to the back yard in the other.  The master bathroom had two doors; one by the bedroom and one by the back door.  This facilitated the bathroom being shared by all the neighbor kids who came to play in the back yard.  Once again, function over form.

Rooms and storage in our house were fit together so tight that I now believe that dad used a shoe horn when he drew up the plans.  I didn’t believe that when I was small however.  I thought we had a big house.  We could fit ten people around our dining room table.  Of course the first one in had to go to the far end and couldn't escape once everyone else was seated. 

The upstairs had a couple more rooms.  Coming off the backside wall of the hall was a second entry to the master bedroom, the hall bathroom and the hall closet.   The hall closet was maybe three and a half feet wide and two and a half feet deep.  A shelf about six feet high extended to the ceiling for storage and the floor was sloped.  The sloped floor could hold shoes because narrow boards running lengthwise had been nailed into the floor so it would catch the shoe heels.  The hall closet was my favorite place to hide when playing hide and seek.  I would scooch up to the top of the sloping floor and hide behind the coats.  You really had to look to find me there.

Perhaps the one flourish in the home design was the redwood paneling that covered the living room walls and served as a veneer around a support beam which the vaulted ceiling rested on, providing an open space between the dining and living room.  Actually, all the rooms upstairs had vaulted ceilings, a nice feature for sure, but truthfully the home was just a long rectangular box so the vault went right down the center of the house.  Function won out again.

Of course, I really didn’t care about form or function that day.  I had a goal.  I started climbing to the top of the stairs.  Unbeknownst to me a slight problem was arising.  Being eight, I was not a very observant tyke.  I had failed to notice the pertinent architectural features of the house.  As I had mentioned, the stairs had a very tall vaulted ceiling that made the stairway seem very open.  At the top of the stairs was a four foot by four foot landing.  As I reached the landing, I turned around, placed my toes at the top step’s edge and focused on the cushion at the bottom of the stairs. Swinging my arms back I crouched down and for just a split second I held the mounting energy in my stance; my energy suddenly reversing my arms thrown forward and legs springing I was on my way.  It was a long ways to that cushion.  I had to clear 11 stairs.

As my feet left that top step, I looked up for the first time.  I noticed that the back wall from the hall closet was coming towards me while I was in mid-flight.  I surveyed the situation and made a snap judgment which perhaps only an eight year old could appreciate the simplistic beauty and novelty of the choice. With the wall getting closer and closer, I shut my eyes.

I don’t know how it happened but I’ll tell you that I sure am grateful for function.  Someplace between Newton’s law of gravity, my falling with style, and the functionality of a sloped floor of a hall closet that precisely matched the sloped ceiling of the last four steps of the stairway, I managed to hit the cushion at the bottom of the stairs without hitting the wall. 

I grew in wisdom that day.  As I stood up from the cushion, I distinctly remember my first thoughts.  “That was stupid. I’ll never do that again” And I haven’t.