While we were a relatively normal, conservative, religious family, there were always things that stood out.

The house we lived in after 1982 had odd features

that made little sense. In the basement of the house there was a spare bedroom with an attached

bathroom. This was weird for a house that was built in 1905. Back then, basements were just basements.

They were not often made into livable space.

The bedroom was used by my oldest brother in the late 1980s. Before that, it was used as an office by my dad. On the stairway leading down into the basement, there was a landing. On the wall at this

landing, there was a removable shadowboard panel that would allow a person to see into the basement there was a landing. On the wall at this landing there was a removable

shadowboard panel that would allow a person to see into the bathroom. The large mirror on the

basement bathroom wall was a two-way mirror. From the landing in the basement one could see the entire

bathroom. They would also be able to see a large portion of the bedroom if the bathroom

door was open. This means that before we purchased the house, someone had been using the feature

to spy on people in the bedroom bathroom combo in the basement. I suspect that the feature was

likely installed for voyeuristic purposes by the previous owner.

Even though this feature existed at the house before we moved in, it stands out as just another

oddity of my childhood. As I mentioned previously, that basement room functioned as my father's office

for quite some time. On numerous occasions, I spotted him removing

the panel to investigate the basement bathroom and bedroom. He did this at a time when nobody would

have been living down there. My question was always the same. What was he expecting to see in an empty room? We were a working poor family,

but in 1985 my father purchased a video camera that in those days would have cost well over a

thousand dollars. The camera was set up in his basement office on a tripod that pointed into a television screen.

I would eventually find that he was recording videos of the television screen while the camera was using the same television screen as an output.

This created an infinite loop, like having two mirrors facing each other,

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