Hot Lava Room

Why do we call it the Hot Lava Room? We’ll get to that later . .. much later. What is a room? Four walls, ceiling, floor. This one had three little welled basement windows near the ceiling, a fireplace. It was a long, large room( the picture shows only half of it) that nearly spanned the entire width of my parental home- the home I came to as a newborn from the hospital and the home I left for Ricks College from eighteen years later. Was it my favorite room in the house? No. Probably wouldn’t even be in my top five favorite rooms. But there are a lot of memories there. It was the family room before the house was remodeled and a new, beautiful family room was added upstairs. But I have no memory of that. I was only five when we remodeled. To me, it was always just a large room downstairs that wasn’t used much. My first memories of the hot lava room are long before it was a hot lava room. Our cousins, Martha and Linda would come for family dinners. After we giggled our way through dinner, we were banished to the basement to play. We invented the colored egg or “Peep! Peep!” game. One person was “it” and the others would be eggs and sit on the shelf. Each egg would choose a color in his mind. “It” would go around knocking on the heads of the eggs and guess a color. If the color was wrong, the egg was mute (as all eggs should be). But if the color was right, the egg would say,”Peep! Peep!” then jump down and run a pre -determined course with “It” in hot pursuit. Whoever got back to the egg’s spot last was now “It.” For some reason we thought it was very fun. Many hours were spent there peeping and chasing and giggling.

Fast forward to the Christmas when my brother was given a train track for Christmas. My parents had someone build a marvelous train track for him. It was two large pieces of plywood hinged together in the middle with a train track around the outside. Turn it upside down, put it on a table, and it became a ping pong table when a net was added. So began the beatings. Many an evening was spent in the hot lava room getting a little white ball slammed into my face by my brother John. I would hit a high, fat ball over the net, and back it would come hard and fast. He'd usually play left-handed to give me a fighting chance, but still I never beat him. Not even close.

One night I took off my pink winged glasses that had real glass lenses so they wouldn’t get broken by my brother’s intense hits. I put them on the bookshelf in the hot lava room. Then I forgot. It was days before I remembered where those glasses were and could see again. Years later, one of Ken’s brothers was bragging about what a good ping pong player he was. He’d won the SUU Institute tournament or something. So I played him and beat him. I didn’t cream him, but I beat him. “Where did you learn to play like that?” For the first time, I appreciated my brother’s schooling.

The room had an entire wall with built-in bookshelves. I didn't realize until I was writing this that I modeled my own basement family room after this room, as I also devoted an entire wall to bookshelves. It was full of books. I remember going down there as a girl and looking through the books. The beautiful art books, the "Book of Knowledge" series, the medical books, the National Geographic magazines, plus many novels and other non-fiction books. I think I learned to love books in front of those shelves.

Fast forward to my teenage years. For some reason, I liked to spend my evenings after school and dinner in the hot lava room. I set up my stereo in there and listened to the radio while I did my homework. In the early 70’s, the rock opera album “Jesus Christ Super Star” was extremely popular. The radio station would play the theme song often. I was very offended by that song. Each time it came on the radio, I ran to the beige dial phone in the hot lava room and dialed the number of the Nampa radio station. As soon as the DJ would answer, I’d say, “Take that song off!” and slam the phone down. My tactics were less than Christian, but I made a statement.

Graduation night was spent in the hot lava room. I invited several “Mormon” friends to party after graduation. Before and after that, nearly every Friday evening was spent in that room with friends, playing Monopoly, ping pong, Password, etc. It was the Mormon hangout- a safe place.

Okay, now we’re to the hot lava part. Up until now, it wasn’t the hot lava room. My earliest memories are of a hard vinyl tile, black and mauve squares, if I remember right. I probably wouldn’t remember it, except that my older sisters used to have to wax and buff it with a buffing machine. They complained ever after that the “little girls” never had to work that hard while they were growing up. Ya Da Ya Da! Then there was some indistinct brown carpet. It was after I left home that the soft, thick “hot lava” carpet was laid in that room. I’m not sure why anyone would choose that bright orange-red- black concoction for a floor. But I’m glad they did. Much like the giggling cousins of yesteryear, a new batch of cousins was banished to the basement hot lava room after dinner for hours of play. A huge cupboard was full of costumes: old dresses, hats, gloves, muu muus, high heels, leis, etc, etc. Many cousin hours were spent in dress up. But the most engaging game was hot lava. I really need someone of that generation to explain the game. (It’s kind of like getting to the end of the joke and you realize you don’t know the punch line.) But I know that they set up chairs and traveled around the entire room without touching the carpet. For the carpet was “hot lava.” If they touched it, they’d burn. I really think some of them actually believed they would, judging by the intensity with which they played. There’s not a Gabrielsen cousin that doesn’t know about the hot lava room. Ask them. It is what you did at Grandma’s house. Now there’s another generation- a generation that doesn’t know about “Peep! Peep!” or “Hot Lava”. But I hope as they are banished to their grandmother’s basements, that they will come up with their own cousin games. Ones that will endear them to grandma’s carpet or ping pong table or basement room or whatever, but mostly to each other. For really that’s what rooms are- places where memories are made and where we are bound together- forever. “Peep! Peep!”