1985, Addison-Wesley Publishing - Paperback

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tom Bodett has brought a breath of fresh Alaska air to 'All Things Considered' listeners. I'm delighted that his warming perspectives on life and other matters have now been committed to print. Readers are in for pleasant enlightenments..."
--Susan Stamberg, National Public Radio

 

Tom Bodett's sharp-eyed accounting of a host of life's perpetual disorders is one of those all-too-few gems that really make you laugh out loud.
--Bob Elliott (from "Bob and Ray")

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With a gentle wit and a warm-hearted spirit, Tom shares with us his humorous perspectives on the way we live. He muses about everything from the pleasant futility of salmon fishing and the joys of his favorite holiday - Halloween - to quiet afternoons with his soap opera families and endless nights in pursuit of trivia.

 

Small Places (page 23)

My wife and I have lived in small houses so long you’d think we’d be used to it by now. But it never fails. Every year we drift a little closer to flipping out for good. We’ve tried to prevent it. We have some rules that only people living in small places can understand.

Only one person can get out of bed at a time in the morning. First one up has to be completely showered, dressed, and fed before the other is allowed out of bed. It’s a harsh rule, I know, but it works; and besides, I’m never the first one up. Another rule is no unnecessary motion. If you need something, the odds are that the other person can reach it from where they’re sitting and just hand it to you. So just ask for it.

I think this rule started when we began letting the dog in the house. If you stand up, the dog stands up, wags his tail, and knocks over somebody’s orange juice. There’s a big mess, everybody gets upset, and the dog sleeps outside again. So it’s best just to stay calm and try not to move around a lot.

We’ve lived together long enough that motion in itself is not a big problem. We’re like magnets that repel each other in one of those little maze games. She starts down the hall; I back out. I go for a cup of coffee; she sidesteps to the sink, and not a word is said. Those are the good days. The bad days are when you open up the cupboard to get a glass, the spaghetti bag opens and dumps those sharp and stiff little noodles all over your bare feet, and then they break on the rug. The vacuum cleaner is buried underneath the cat food, laundry soap, and a clothes basket - requiring what amounts to a minor archeological dig to uncover it. Those are the days when the neighborhood is treated to a helpless scream of sorts and one of us stomps out of the house for a walk or a drive.

In the winter even a drive in the country can be a confining and maddening experience. Compact cars and trucks should not be sold in the same states as insulated pack boots. You can push down all three pedals with one foot. This will simultaneously accelerate, brake, and drop the vehicle out of gear, effectively red-lining the engine. Then you panic, lift your foot, and neatly stall the car with a lurch into traffic. The whole time, you’re trying to scrape a little peephole in the frost on your windshield. It’s enough to drive you to strange religions.

If they promised a heaven where gas was thirty-two cents a gallon and all they sold were Buicks, I’d be a reformed man. But instead they keep selling us smaller and smaller cars to drive us around between smaller and smaller houses. I know I shouldn’t let it get me down.

One positive aspect of living in a small place is that we can adequately heat our home with a good conversation and a mood candle. If it does get a little stuffy, opening the door for fifteen seconds will give us a complete air exchange. The only problem is that the exchanged air is never quite as warm as the old, so we don’t do that very often and have a tendency to sometimes smell like what we had for dinner the night before.

All in all it’s not so bad, and like good Americans we sit fat and happy, and try not to think about it. It keeps us close and promotes togetherness, much in the same way prisoner-of-war camps do. Although I’m certain that keeping two prisoners in a cell the size of our house would be a violation of the Geneva Convention, we call it home and like everybody’s home, it’s almost always the best place to be.

 

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