Every family has a few legendary stories that never lose their appeal not matter how many times you tell them.

For mine, one of those is the tale of my younger brother putting his head through the basement wall.  It happened right here during a game of pickle with our other brother when we were all quite young:

The ping pong table wasn’t there at the time.  On the far end we had stacked up a few camping air mattresses to allow for sliding into the base without rug burn, except all that did was provide a near friction-free, headfirst trip through drywall as Pat dove to avoid a tag.  I wish we had a picture of the result.  Pat’s head perfectly split the studs, leaving drywall dust in his hair as the only real damage.

He stood up and looked blankly at me and Ben, appearing calm and okay until we asked the natural question: “Didn’t that hurt?”  Then, with the realization visibly spreading through his body, his brain registered that perhaps that wasn’t such a pleasant experience, and he started to cry.  Not wanting to get in trouble for either injury or property destruction, Ben and I went into damage control mode, doing everything we could to get Pat to stop.

Thus was born, “Baby drink coffee, coffee drink baby,” a completely ridiculous phrase that we repeated over and over, as fast as we could, as Pat shifted from tears to uncontrollable laughter.  There is no good explanation for why this worked, but even if I got hit with the Men In Black mind eraser, that memory would somehow still endure.

While we’re on the topic of basement damage, there are some other epic tales from down there.  That window in the first picture is a recent addition.  There used to be a roughly two foot by one foot window at the top, which we broke at least three times by playing baseball games with the batter hitting balls in that direction.  We eventually got smart enough to use foam balls:

Of course, that didn’t stop us from continuing to do some damage.  It’s possible I may have followed through a bit too high a couple of times and left my mark on the ceiling:

In high school, a couple of my friends were wrestling just below that mark and ended up accidentally running into the wall, leaving a butt-sized hole.  To their credit, the pusher showed up the next day with a square of drywall and a toolbox and patched that sucker up:

Lions are versatile creatures.  They can hunt, star in Disney films and serve as Hollywood studio mascots.

They can also obscure obscure hockey stick holes in the wall:

That, by the way, is the exact moment that roller hockey got banned in the basement.  In retrospect we probably got lucky that was the worst thing we did.

On the other side of the basement, where the ping pong table was located for most of my life, is a whole whose origins I don’t quite know, but I suspect were somehow the result of a paddle hit:

What I like most about this one is the mystery involved.  Not the way it was created, but rather what is down inside the wall there.

I can’t say for sure how many, but I absolutely know there are several ping pong balls that got pushed through the hole over the years.  That’s probably a better end for cracked ones than the more fun game of smashing them as hard as possible at a sibling.  I hope someone keeps the collection if and when they open up that wall.

(P.S. If you want to know more about the artwork on the walls, it’s all explained here.)