{Lent 2024…I write each day as a Lenten discipline, and have chosen the word “room” to consider for these forty days. Yesterday, I wrote of having my “own room” in our big Liberty Avenue house. But there was a lot of traffic through there. So I moved. There’s my bed in the old space. Note sisters 1 & 3, brother 2, dog 3, shortwave radio, and an alarm clock. And inexplicably, an accordian. See why I had to move?}

I guess it was about the time I hit adolescence that my Dad thought I should have a more private room. The one I had called mine before that was a major thoroughfare in the Kellam household. To get to the cellar, my brothers’ room, Mom’s various work rooms, and one of the three bathrooms in the house, one had to pass through my bedroom. So that I could have more privacy to deal with acne and geometry, Dad’s solution involved that aforementioned bathroom. He’d convert it into a small bedroom for the eldest Kellam kid. Me.

So the plumbing was sealed off, sink and toilet removed, along with the ancient claw-foot bathtub that sat (or did it stand?) near the window. The floor was repaired, walls papered (with a boy’s sports theme), and a small bed went on the tub’s claw-foot-print. Dad built a desk onto one wall, my study carrel. The desk was probably to encourage me to do homework someplace other than in the front of the TV in the living room.

Looking back, that small room was about the size of a jail cell. Not that I’ve ever been confined to one. But it was pretty confining in there. Still, I was glad to have a room with a door, and some space for school books and the all-important radios. The family faced some sacrifice though. One less bathroom in a 13 room house. By the time we moved to a new home, there were eight of us using two very small bathrooms. (I guess we were lucky to have that much; when the house was built some 120 years earlier, the Mersereaus had an outhouse. The number of seats in there is lost to history.)

I don’t recall whose grand idea this was, but maybe it was mine. Dad’s modest collection of LPs (records) found its way into many-sleeved albums, with the record jackets of no importance to the music-listeners in the family. So, my room was decorated with cast-off LP artworks. The photo here hardly does the room justice. My bathroom/bedroom/cell looked like Woody’s Record Shop, our favorite music store up on The Ave. I see Sinatra was prominent in overlooking my algebra homework.

If I’m to draw any significance from this “reflection,” I suppose it would be how lucky (blessed would be the better word) I was to have a space of my own. Of course, many or most do not. I picture immigrant teens the age I was when I slept in either bedroom I’ve mentioned here. They are on the street. Or, kids who have grown up in poverty in the U.S. — they may share space with their whole family. In our prayers each day, Joan and I often give thanks for not only the meal we are about to enjoy, but the for the “many blessings we have overlooked today.” And how often we overlook our own comfortable space.