A Nest to Come Home To 167 167 My green leather chair is eighteen years old now and the rest of the family complains about what it looks like but I notice they take every chance they get to sit in it. I don"t take that chair when I come into the room because I"m the husband or the father. I sit in that chair because it"s my my chair. It"s as much mine as my shoes. If they want one like it they can have one but I like a chair I can call my own. Familiar things are a great comfort to us all. chair. It"s as much mine as my shoes. If they want one like it they can have one but I like a chair I can call my own. Familiar things are a great comfort to us all.
When the Christmas catalogs begin to come in and there"s a noticeable increase in the amount of mail coming into the house, I usually make a decorating change of my own. I move another little table over by my chair so I have a table on either side of me. It"s a temporary thing for one time of year. When the Christmas cards start coming, I have a better way of separating the cards from the bills and the junk mail from the personal letters. If you keep the newspaper, the mail, a letter opener, a gla.s.s, scissors, three elastic bands, some paper clips, some loose change, the television guide, two books and a magazine next to you, one table next to your chair isn"t enough at Christmas.
When I sit down in my chair at night, it"s the one place in the world I have no complaint with. It"s just the way I like it. I"m wearing comfortable clothes, my feet are up and I"m surrounded by things that are there because I choose to have them there.
I was telling my wife how quickly and how well American soldiers make a nest for themselves, no matter what their circ.u.mstances are. They can be out in a field somewhere but first thing you know they"ve dug a foxhole and invented some conveniences for themselves out of empty coffee cans and cardboard containers. They"ve made that one little spot in the world their own. It"s true but I never should have told my wife.
"That"s what this place looks like," she said, "a foxhole."
RealReal Estate When the real-estate people talk about s.p.a.ce in houses, they put too much emphasis on the number of bedrooms and bathrooms and too little on how much stuff the kitchen counters will hold.
If we ever have to move out of our house it would be because we"ve run out of places in the kitchen to put all the pots, pans and electrical appliances we"ve bought or been given for Christmas. Things are approaching the crisis stage now on our kitchen counters. I don"t buy sliced bread, and it"s getting very difficult to clear enough s.p.a.ce to operate with a bread knife.
In addition to running out of counter s.p.a.ce, we"re running out of places underneath the counter to put pots, pans and a wide variety of culinary miscellany. When we had the kitchen redone five years ago, we made sure we had plenty of storage s.p.a.ce for pots and pans under the counter, but that was five years ago. The pots have expanded to fit the s.p.a.ce available to them and now we have more.
It"s the odd-sized, odd-shaped pots and pans that are most difficult. There are things we don"t use more than twice a year taking up valuable real estate under the kitchen counters but I don"t know what to do with them. Where do you keep the fluted cake pans, the cookie cutters, a pressure cooker, Pyrex dishes, big baking pans for the turkey, a fondue pot, the cast-iron popover pan and the m.u.f.fin tins?
We need double the number of electrical outlets on the back wall of the counter.
Let me see if I can make a list of the major items on the counters without going upstairs to the kitchen to look. The kitchen counters now hold: a toaster-oven, a blender, a heavy-duty mixer, an electric can opener, one orange-juice squeezer, a Cuisinart, a radio, one small blackand-white TV.
Don"t tell me some of these items are repet.i.tious because I know it, but if you"re given a Cuisinart you can"t throw it away even if you have a Mixmaster and a Waring blender.
Real Real Estate Real Estate 169 169 In addition to these electrical devices, there are, below the counter, a pancake grill, a waffle iron, an egg poacher that hasn"t poached an egg in twelve years, an electric fry pan, a deep fryer we never use and a small ice-cream freezer. Pushed to the back is an electric knife that I"ve only used twice although it was given to us by a relative who now has been dead for nine years.
It"s apparent we need either a great deal more counter s.p.a.ce in the kitchen or we need someone to invent a compact combination radioTV-toaster-oven that would open cans, squeeze oranges, whip egg whites and mix cake batters.
I have my house, but my advice to anyone about to buy a new one is to ask some questions beyond how many bedrooms there are. Don"t think you"re smart because you"ve asked about the type of heating and the amount of insulation. Ask the real-estate salesperson some really hard questions. Ask, for instance, how much room is left on either side after you"ve put two cars in the two-car garage.
Have the real-estate salesman demonstrate how to put the vacuum cleaner away in a closet that"s already full of heavy winter coats and leaves for the dining-room table.
Ask the person selling you the house where you"re going to put the wheelbarrow and the snow tires and try to figure out where you"d hang the leaf rakes and the shovel.
Look at the new house carefully and estimate how far you"re going to have to carry the garbage can to get it to a place near the road where the garbagemen will take it . . . then figure out where the garbage can is going to go when it isn"t by the edge of the road. Measure the distance between the big outside garbage can and the little inside garbage can that you have to empty into it.
Measure everything and make sure you know where you"re going to be able to store the screens and the screen door when you replace them with the storm doors and the storm windows.
Home O ne Sat.u.r.day night we were sitting around our somewhat shopworn living room with some old friends when one of them started trying to remember how long we"d lived there.
"Since 1952," I said. "We paid off the mortgage eight years ago."
"If you don"t have a mortgage," he said, "the house isn"t worth as much as if you did have one."
Being in no way clever with money except when it comes to spending it, this irritated me.
"To whom is it not worth as much," I asked him in a voice that was louder than necessary for him to hear what I was saying. "Not to me, and I"m the one who lives here. As a matter of fact, I like it about fifty percent more than I did when the bank owned part of it."
"What did you pay for it?" he asked.
"We paid $29,500 in 1952."
My friend nodded knowingly and thought a minute.
"I"ll bet you," he said, "that you could get $85,000 for it today . . . you ought to ask $95,000."
I don"t know why this is such a popular topic of conversation these days, but if any real-estate dealers are reading this, I"ll give them some money-saving advice. Don"t waste any stamps on me with your offers to buy. You can take me off your mailing list.
Our house is not an investment. It is not a hastily erected shelter in which to spend the night before we rise in the morning to forge on farther west to locate in another campsite at dusk. Our house is our home. We live there. It is an anchor. It is the place we go to when we don"t feel like going anyplace.
We do not plan to move.
The last census indicated that forty million Americans move every year. One out of every five packs up his things and goes to live somewhere else.
Home 171 171 Where is everyone moving to? Why are they moving there? Is it really better someplace else?
If people want a better house, why don"t they fix the one they have?
If the boss says they"re being transferred and have to move, why don"t they get another job? Jobs are easier to come by than a home. I can"t imagine giving up my home because my job was moving.
I have put up twenty-nine Christmas trees in the bay window of the living room, each a little too tall. There are scars on the ceiling to prove it.
Behind the curtain of the window nearest my wife"s desk, there is a vertical strip of wall four inches wide that has missed the last four coats of paint so that the little pencil marks with dates opposite them would not be obliterated. If we moved, someone would certainly paint that patch and how would we ever know again how tall the twins were when they were four?
My son Brian has finished college and is working and no longer lives at home, but his marbles are in the bottom drawer of his dresser if he ever wants them.
There"s always been talk of moving. As many as ten times a year we talk about it. The talk was usually brought on by a leaky faucet, some peeling paint or a neighbor we didn"t like.
When you own a house you learn to live with its imperfections. You accommodate yourself to them and, like your own shortcomings, you find ways to ignore them.
Our house provides me with a simple pleasure every time I come home to it. I am welcomed by familiar things when I enter, and I"m warmed by some ambience that may merely be dust, but it is our dust and I like it. There are reverberations of the past everywhere, but it is not a sad place, because all the things left undone hold great hope for its future.
The talk of moving came up at dinner one night ten years ago. Brian was only half-listening, but at one point he looked up from his plate, gazed around the room and asked idly, "Why would we want to move away from home?"
When anyone asks me how much I think our house is worth, I just smile. They couldn"t buy what that house means to me for all the money in both local banks.
The house is not for sale.
Struck by the Christmas Lull A strange lull sets in sometime during the afternoon of Christmas Day in our house.
The early-morning excitement is over, the tension is gone and dinner isn"t ready yet. One of our problems may be that we don"t have Christmas dinner until about six. We plan it for four but we have it at six.
The first evidence of any non-Christmas spirit usually comes about one o"clock. We"ve had a big, late breakfast that didn"t end until 9:30 or 10:00 and the dishes for that aren"t done until after we open our presents.
Washing the breakfast dishes runs into getting Christmas dinner. The first little flare-up comes when someone wanders into the kitchen and starts poking around looking for lunch. With dinner planned for four o"clock, there"s no lunch on the schedule. Margie"s busy trying to get the cranberry jelly out of the molds and she isn"t interested in serving lunch or having anyone get their own.To her, at this point, food means dirty dishes.
It isn"t easy to organize the meals over a Christmas weekend. Everyone is always complaining about eating too much one minute and out in the kitchen looking for food the next. We might be able to get away with just two meals if we had Christmas dinner at two. I forget why we don"t but we don"t.
We have thirteen people this year. The lull will strike them all but each will handle it differently.
A few will sit around the living room. Someone will decide to tidy up the place by putting all the wrapping paper and ribbons in a big, empty box that held a Christmas present a few hours earlier.
Struck by the Christmas Lull 173 173 [image]
The Rooney clan with friends, circa 1983; behind Marge (seated) are daughter Martha and son Brian (with moustache); to Andy"s left are daughters Ellen and Emily I don"t do any of this because I love the mess. As soon as you clean up the living room, Christmas is over.
At one end of the couch, someone will be reading the newspaper. It"s usually pretty thin. There isn"t much news and very little advertising. One of the editors has had a reporter do the story about what the homeless will be having for Christmas dinner at the Salvation Army kitchen, but it"s slim pickin"s in the paper.
My sister Nancy sits there reading out Christmas cards and looking at presents given to other people that she missed when they were being opened.
There are usually a few nappers. Someone will hog the whole couch by stretching out and falling asleep on it. The smart, serious nappers will disappear into an upstairs bedroom.
One of the kids will be working on or putting together a present he or she got. Someone will be reading a new book. (No one watches television in our house on Christmas Day.) At some point there"s a flurry of phone calls, in and out. We"ll start making calls to other members of the family who can"t be there or who are close but not in our inner circle. Usually one of the twins" cla.s.smates will call to see if they can get together during the few days they"re both in town.
There"s always someone who wants to know if the drugstore is open. They don"t really want anything, they"re just looking for some excuse to get out of the house.
If I"ve been given some new tool, I go down to the bas.e.m.e.nt and try it out on a piece of wood. That"s usually interrupted by a call from the head of the stairs asking if I want to go over to the indoor courts and play tennis. I"m always touched by the fact the kids want me to play tennis with them. It wouldn"t be because I pay for the courts, would it?
By about four o"clock the Christmas Day lull is over. We all congregate in the living room again to have a drink. Nancy has slow-baked almonds and pecans that have been kept hidden from Brian and Ellen all day.
Everyone"s relaxed again now. Dinner"s ready but a Christmas dinner can be put on hold, so there"s no rush. A turkey is better left at least half an hour after it comes out of the oven before it"s carved. Mashed potatoes, creamed onions and squash are all easy to keep warm. The peppermint candy cane ice cream stays frozen.
I hate to have Christmas end.
An Appreciative Husband"s Grat.i.tude Wives do a thousand little things for their husbands that they don"t get credit for.
Right here I want to give credit where credit is due. A few weeks ago, while I was away, Margie did something for me I"ll never forget.
An Appreciative Husband"s Grat.i.tude 175 175 [image]Andy and Marge Rooney, at home in Rowayton, Connecticut She cleaned up my shop in the bas.e.m.e.nt. She got our friend Joe to come in and help and between them they tidied up everything. It must have taken several days because it would have been impossible to put that many things in places where I can"t find them in less than several days.
I confess that the shop would have looked as though it was a mess to anyone but me. To me, everything was in its place. I had little sc.r.a.ps of wood everywhere. If I use six feet of a seven-foot piece of maple, I don"t throw away the leftover foot. I save it. I don"t always put my sc.r.a.ps of wood away neatly in a pile of other sc.r.a.ps, but I know where they are. Now my sc.r.a.ps of wood are in neat piles. I can"t find them, but they"re neatly piled.
I would be the first to admit that I"m not neat. (Come to think of it, I was not the first to admit it. Other people have said it several hundred times before I ever did.) My wood treasures, pieces of lumber, were leaning against the bas.e.m.e.nt walls or were stashed up in between the beams under the diningroom floor upstairs. Because there were years of acc.u.mulated sawdust everywhere, Margie and Joe moved everything. Margie said she was afraid of fire, but if the house had burned down, it wouldn"t have disrupted my shop any more than the cleaning job did.
There were dozens of different sizes of nuts, bolts, nails and screws on my workbench. When I wanted one I pawed through the pile until I found the size I wanted. No longer. Now only the three of them- Margie, Joe and G.o.d-know where anything is. Margie"s out shopping, I don"t know where Joe is and G.o.d has more important things to do than tell me where they put my dovetail jig.
All those nuts and bolts and screws are in dozens of little jars with tops on them now. When I want one, I dump them out of the jar onto my workbench and paw through them just like before.
Tools like chisels and screwdrivers were lying helter-skelter on my workbench. No longer. Margie put each and every item somewhere. That"s the key word. Everything is "somewhere."
I go to the bottom of the cellar steps and yell up, "Hey, Margie! Where did you put the chuck key to my drill?"
"I put it right there somewhere," she yells back in obvious irritation over my lack of appreciation for the work she did.
She hung hammers, saws and extension cords. She put two trisquares down behind some cans on a shelf. I found my level in a box over by the shelves with the paint. Margie and Joe piled my lathe chisels under my workbench and put my drill bits-well, actually I don"t know where they put my drill bits, because I haven"t found them yet.
Listen, it"s just another reason to thank her. Most of those bits were dull anyway, so I went out and bought a set of new ones.
How can I ever express my appreciation for the job Margie did? I"ve been considering some ways. Margie does all our bookkeeping in what used to be the twins" room. Her papers are spread out all over several tables and desks and piled on the little couch that pulls out and turns into a bed at Christmas when everyone"s home. I think that one of these days I"ll repay Margie"s kindness. I"ll pick up her workroom the way she picked up mine. I"ll pile all her papers, government forms, tax receipts and bank records, and put them in boxes. I"ll tidy up. I"ll try and make My House Runneth Over 177 177 that room as spick-and-span and free of anything out-of-place as Margie made my shop.
There must be a rule of life here somewhere. I think the rule may be, "It may be a mess, but it is MY mess."
My House Runneth Over Let me tell you a heartbreaking story of people with no place to sleep at Christmas.
Once upon a long, long time ago there was a house on a hill owned by a writer and his wife. They had four children and five bedrooms. Three of the children were girls and one was a boy. Two of the three girls were twins and sleeping accommodations in the house were ample.
Ah, but that was long ago. The house still has five bedrooms but since Margie took over one of them as her workroom, the bed that was there has been replaced by a convertible sofa that is only made into a double bed in an emergency and even then the foot of it hits her file cabinets.
Two of the remaining four rooms have single beds. The other bedroom sleeps two. Counting the convertible couch, this makes places for eight sleepers.
Our four children come from London, Los Angeles, Boston and Washington for Christmas. They are no longer little kids and they don"t come alone. The twins, with one husband each and three children between them, come as seven. Nancy, my sister, is with us.
To save counting, that"s twelve in all . . . twelve people in a house with real sleeping places for eight.
The couch in the living room and the old couch that was retired to the catch-all room in the bas.e.m.e.nt are pressed into service. That"s ten. I"ve never gotten into the details of where the others go. We close our bedroom door and hope for the best. We have two television reporters in the family but we"ve never seen overcrowding in the shelters they do [image]The Rooney children; from left to right: Brian, Ellen, Emily, and Martha stories about at Thanksgiving that can compare with the squalid conditions in our house at Christmas. It"s enough to bring tears to a grown man"s eyes.
There are clothes, open suitcases everywhere. The three bathrooms are strewn with stray toothbrushes, hair dryers and an a.s.sortment of beauty products . . . although I can"t tell from looking at any of the six women in the house which one uses them. The refrigerator, the washing machine and the dryer get heavy use. The iron is never cool. Someone is always washing himself, herself, hair, clothes or the car. Because of nighttime sleeping conditions, there is random couch-napping during the day and some of the beds are working more than eight-hour shifts.
One year we rented two hotel rooms and another year we used the house of friends who graciously offered it while they were away for Mother 179 179 Christmas. Neither of these alternatives is popular with the family members who have to leave the chaotic, friendly warmth in our house Christmas Eve to go to sleep in a strange place.
All things come to an end and I dread the end of Christmas at our house. I"m not sure how or when it will come. Someone will probably decide it"s too hard. The friends who loaned us their homes have made the Big Switch. They now go to the home of one of their children for Christmas. It could happen to us, I suppose. One more husband, one more wife or another grandchild might do it . . . but then where does everyone go? Do we break up the family and have separate Christmases in different parts of the country? Would this really be as merry? Am I suffering post-Christmas depression? I"ve thought a lot about it and I"ve decided what I want for Christmas next year.
I"d like Santa to bring me an addition to our house with two more bedrooms and another bathroom, even though they"d be empty 363 days a year.
Mother My mother died today.
She was a great mom and I am typing with tears in my eyes. There were a lot of things she wasn"t so good at, but no one was ever better at being a mother.
She never wanted to be anything but but a good mother. It would not satisfy many women today. If I were a woman it would not satisfy me, but there was something good about her being one that exceeded any good I will ever do. a good mother. It would not satisfy many women today. If I were a woman it would not satisfy me, but there was something good about her being one that exceeded any good I will ever do.
I think I know why she was a world champion mother. She had unlimited love and forgiveness in her heart for those close to her. Neither my sister nor I ever did anything so wrong in her eyes that she couldn"t explain it in terms of right. She a.s.sumed our goodness, and no amount of badness in either of us could change her mind. It made us better.
Mother gave the same love to our four children and even had enough left for our family bulldog, Gifford. One summer afternoon at her cottage in a wooded area with a lot of wildlife, some food was left on the table on the front patio. When we came back later, part of it had been eaten, and everyone but Mother suspected our bulldog.
"It couldn"t have been Gifford," Mother said. "It must have been some animal."
From the day she went into the hospital, there was never any question about her living. The doctor treated her as though she might recover, but he knew she would not. I hope he is treated as well on his deathbed.
Something has to be done about the way we die, though. Too often it is not good enough. Some of the people who have heard of Mother"s death at age ninety-three and knew of her protracted illness said, "It"s a blessing," but there was nothing blessed about it.
For seven terrible weeks after a stroke, Mother held on to life with a determination she would not have had if she hadn"t wanted to live.
Visiting her, at first, I was pleased that she seemed unaware of anything and not suffering. I would bend over, stroke her hair, and whisper in her ear, "It"s Andrew, Mom." It would not seem as though she heard, but her hand, which had been picking at the blanket in a manner distinctively her own, groped for mine. She did hear. She did know. She was in a terrible half-dream from which she could not arouse herself. She was suffering and in fear of death, and I could not console myself that she was not.
My wife stood on the other side of the bed. They got along during the twenty years Mother lived with us. Mother lifted her other hand vaguely toward her. Dying, she wished to include my wife, who had been so good to her, in her affection.
Something is wrong, though. She has something in her throat, or one of her legs is caught in an uncomfortable position. You don"t dare touch anything for fear of disconnecting one of the tubes leading from the bottles hanging overhead into her. The nurses are busy with their bookwork, or they are down the hall working routinely toward Mother"s room. Other patients there are caught or choking, too. The nurses know Mother will probably not choke before they get there. They"ve done it all before.
The nurses are very good, but without apparent compa.s.sion, and you realize it has to be that way. They could not possibly work as nurses without some protective coating against tragedy. We all have it. In those seven weeks Mother lay dying, I visited the hospital fifty times, but when I left, it was impossible not to lose some of the sense of her suffering. I knew she was still lying there picking vaguely at the blankets in that sad, familiar way, but it didn"t hurt as much as when I was there, watching.