When we were growing up, we had what we called a
“register” aka a “heat register” through the upstairs bathroom floor. It
was there in order to let the heat into the bathroom from the fuel oil burning
stove in the down stairs kitchen. The stove was located right below it. The
register was a square about 18 inches along each side. It was metal and painted
black. The top was a grid of about 1 inch squares and was bare metal and shinny
from years of walking over it on the bathroom floor. In the summer, it could be
closed by sliding a rectangular metal button and the bottom of the faceplate
would close like a Venetian blind.
Tim and I found many other uses for the “register” besides
heating up the bathroom in the winter. It was located right beside the bathtub.
When it was cold outside we would stand over it to dry off after getting out of
the bathtub. The water from our wet bodies would drip down through the register
and onto the stove below. It would go “ssst” as each drop hit the hot top of
the stove. It really felt good in the winter to stand over it while drying off.
If our parents were in the kitchen, they at least knew we finally took a bath. Sometimes when we
got to “rough housing” (as our grandmother “Ollie” called it), during a bath,
we would cause quite a bit of water to go through the register and hit the top
of the stove and go “SSSSSSSSSST”. They would then yell through the register
and say, “Stop all the “rough HOUSING!!!”
Another good use for the register was to listen to what
adults were saying in the kitchen. Sometimes we heard some very interesting
things. One time, shortly before Christmas, I was eavesdropping through the
open register and I heard our mother tell someone that she got Tim and me a
T.V. for our bedroom for Christmas! Without thinking, I yelled to Tim who was
in our bedroom, “Hey! We’re getting a T.V. for Christmas”! When our
mother heard this through the open register, she was really angry with me. I
could hear her yelling at me through the register! I figured since I “let the cat
out of the bag”, that she would rescind the T.V. idea! Nevertheless, as it
turned out, she didn’t and we did get our old used T.V. for our bedroom. That
was amazing! Looking back, I wonder why she even got us a T.V. for our bedroom
since she was always nagging us to do our homework every evening. Oh well,
getting us a T.V. really didn’t interfere with that since we rarely ever did
our homework anyway. And besides, it kept us out of her hair for the most part
every evening. A Hah! Now I see there was a method to her madness. In the summer,
it was difficult to hear anything in the kitchen because the Venetian blinds in
the register were closed. This time of year when we wanted to hear what was
being said in the kitchen by the grown ups, we had to very discreetly, quietly,
and slowly open the register’s Venetian blinds. Most of the time they heard us
and yelled, “Close the register and go to bed!” During one of their
parties, we could usually open the register undetected because the noise from
the party was so loud, that no one heard us. We used to listen to parties quite
a bit late at night. We usually heard only revelry, laughter, and things we
didn’t understand like gossip about people we didn’t know. Nonetheless, it was
still exciting for us to hear grownups at their own parties. While I’m on the
subject, I’ve noticed over the years that when kids have had a party, they call
it “partied”. i.e., “We partied all night”. That always bugged me that
taking a noun and making it a verb doesn’t sound correct to me. The same goes
when kids talk about a past event especially in a joke or referring to a past
event and use a plural verb for the past tense, for example, “He comes up
and says…” Ugggh, it’s, “He came up and said”! Oh well,
enough of this. If I get on the subject of things that irk me, I’d cover
several hundred pages! I have a story to post either sometime before or after
this story that’s germane to this very subject, so you can read just a very few of the things that really irk me!
It’s titled, “Redundant Redundancies”. If I post it before this one, I’ll put a
link for it here; if I remember
(don’t count on it).
When Tim and/or I felt really mischievous, when no one was
in the kitchen, we would urinate through the register onto the top of the hot
stove in the downstairs kitchen. It sounded neat to hear the continuous
ssssssssssssst and see the steam rise from the hot stove. Of course, this was a
wintertime event. After a awhile, when we were downstairs, someone would say, “What
smells so bad?” That resulted in a quiet chuckle by Tim and/or me J . If they only knew
all the stuff we did! It’s a good thing they didn’t or they would have drunk a
lot more, and they already drank PLENTY!
On other occasions I would use the register as a “stash”
to hide my sister’s cache of costume jewelry. The top of the register could be
removed from the floor by pulling it up. Below it was an opening on the side
between the bathroom floor and kitchen ceiling. It made a perfect place to hide
the “lute” and no one ever found my hiding place. As usual, my sister would
complain to my mother about my “jewelry heist”, she then would yell at me to
put it all back while muttering to herself about my mental state of mind by
calling me a “Psychopath” or something. I always put all of it back until the
next time I pulled off the same caper. I could never understand why my sister
got so upset every time I pulled my jewelry heist since I don’t recall her EVER
wearing any of it as a kid. Oh Oh! Since my sister reads all these stories,
she’ll find out where my hiding place was! Oh well, confession is good for the
soul! Well, Sue, NOW you know! Now, if I could just find out where I hid my
brain back then…
