Subterranean Faith-Check

Natalie Goldberg, an author of Zen-writing practice, suggests in her "Writing Down the Bones" that whenever you get stuck and do not know what to write about, you should begin with "I remember..." or "I do not remember..." and fill in the blanks for at least ten minutes. My sister told me last night that she hit a writing wall and opted for the latter solution. The first thing she did not remember was when she actually, wholeheartedly, and without reservation, believed in God. This confession called to mind the rare and evanescent memories of when I wasn't yet touched by prurient hands, schemers, cognitive dissonance, heartbreak, puberty, or death. It was when I was all belief. I don't remember consciously walking around, oozing with faith or anything; I was no Russian pilgrim repeating a simple mantra. My unmitigated belief in God is or was inextricably linked to memories of my old house's basement, and only my basement.

As with most children, the basement represented something sinister for me. It was darker down there. Subterranean, away from where people walked and smiled and held hands and carried on business. It was attached to the garage, an even danker gutted cave of concrete. There was a large pipe running through the plaster-pockmarked ceiling into the cement that made demonic hissing sounds when it rushed with the kind of waterfall you'd never cool off under every time the upstairs toilet flushed. Millipedes and centipedes silently stampeded and I knew it was more their house than mine. Cobwebbed corners and monstrous metal cabinets crowded the room with things I didn't understand. Photo albums of people I'd never know, liquor locked up with stamp collections and antique coins, giant dumbbells, and bungee cords and bike pumps...When you don't understand things, they frighten you. Especially if you're in the 5-7 years-old range, which I was. The basement scared me.

So, my "I do not remember" begins with an "I remember." I remember one particular day I went down to the basement to get tennis rackets. We hung them on the wall by the washer and stationary tub. No one else was home--my mom had just left to "go to the store" because moms are always leaving to go to the store. She had also apparently put in a load of wash into the dryer before leaving. I descended the stairs slowly and began my typical meditation of "Stop being stupid, Sarah. Nothing's gonna happen to you down there. It's just the basement." It's just the basement, right. I could only hear my heartbeat and the creaks of the stairs and the vague vibrations of the dryer. I started to think about death and dying and what I'd do if Mom never came back and what if monsters exist, and what if they live in my basement? When I was really starting to lose it, just when I was about to convince myself I didn't want to get the tennis rackets out to get Katie to play a game when she got home because she'd probably be tired anyway and maybe I'd just go to the park...there was a sudden, horror movie scale shattering of glass, like someone had struck out all the windows and was about to kick the last splinters in, climb down, and take me. I froze and waited the kind of ten minutes that proves time is arbitrary, and subjective, because it was probably only around 2. When no one crept out, shining dagger in hand, when no animal scurried through to wreak havoc, when no monster manifested itself, when no other sound was heard and the dryer buzzed instilling an even deeper stillness...I steeled myself and decided to go in there and find out just what the hell happened. The basement was partitioned into two sections, a livable one, and a not livable one. Of course the laundry, the rackets, the furnace (fuck "Home Alone" for knowing my fear so well) and the fear were in the room not visible from the bottom of the stairs, so there was still room to turn back.

And this is about the last time I remember believing in God. Shivering at the foot of the stairs, alone and in the age of single digits, convincing myself to prove I wasn't crazy, that glass did break, that something happened, and that I wasn't afraid. How did I convince myself to go in there? I thought of God, that elusive loving character I was learning about in school, in Sunday school, and over supper. He would not let anything hurt me, I honestly thought. My reasoning was that yeah, there might be something super scary in there, but God would be there too. And He would make it okay. I pictured Him with a graying beard and avuncular smile and flowing garb, as he was drawn in my easy-to-read mini Bible. He'd protect me.

I went in. The muddled charcoal ground was covered in splinters of glass and a thin layer of some clear liquid. I tiptoed through the strange, centimetric pond and around the glass and realized what happened, the wrinkled wet label told me. Mom had left a 6-pack of Seagrams tonic water on the dryer. The vibrations of the dryer slowly nudged those quivering glass bottles towards the edge until they broke right when I was nearing my own breaking point. I cleaned up the mess and wondered why the hell Mom bought tonic water anyway. I still don't know how I feel about tonic water, and I still don't know how I feel about God. I do know how I feel about the basement, though. Some things don't change.