A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
When I was a kid, my parents put up a big bulletin board on one of the walls in my bedroom. It was probably 5 feet wide and 3 feet tall. Or maybe 6 feet wide and 4 feet tall? The thing was huge. I don’t know what prompted this design choice, but I went […]
My second grade teacher, Mrs. Lawrence, insisted that students continue wearing winter coats during recess until the first day of spring, no matter how warm the weather got before then. This was in Arkansas, where winter usually ends in February. By early March we were red-faced and sweating out on the playground, but Mrs. Lawrence […]
Of the historic homes I toured during family vacations as a child (we really knew how to have a good time), I can remember precisely one thing about each site. According to the Monticello website, Thomas Jefferson had two dumbwaiters installed in the dining room for the purpose of bringing up bottles from the wine […]
Because I was born at the tail end of the 1970s, I can remember a time when the default settings for luggage didn’t involve wheels. Instead, you had to carry your suitcase by a handle. And the valise, to use a grandparental term, would be constructed out of sturdy materials that made the item weigh, […]
I shampoo my hair every two to three days. I used to wash it daily but then someone convinced me that was too much. Apparently I was putting my hair at risk of becoming dry and brittle. My hairstylist at the time and several other anti-‘poo proselytizers made the case for infrequent washing, but the […]
The zip code in my hometown of Springdale, Arkansas, is 72764. Not long ago, one of my sisters gave me a T-shirt with those numbers spelled out on the front. I assume she was trying to help prevent me from forgetting where I came from. When you move away from somewhere, forgetting where you came […]
I had trouble telling time when I was a kid. The whole short-hand/long-hand, numbers-in-a-circle system struck me as prohibitively complicated. I knew you were supposed to glance at your wristwatch or a wall clock and instantly recognize that it was 3:47 or whatever, but it always took me a few too many ticks of the […]
The knife is the king, and the big fork is the queen. Each spouse has a sidekick—the spoon (a duke) for the king, the salad fork (a lady-in-waiting) for the queen. Those are the roles I assigned the flatware whenever I’d find myself at a restaurant as a child. I would put the royal quartet […]
When I was a kid back in Arkansas, snow wasn’t unheard of, but it was always an event bordering on the miraculous. The heavens would open up and make the view from my bedroom window look like a Christmas card, and somehow that meant I got a brief reprieve from long division. It was enough […]
When I was a kid, the big trend in stickers was scratch-and-sniff technology—yet another miracle of the modern age we now take for granted. My circa 1985 sticker album—a colorful spiral notebook with 16 cardboard pages on which blank spaces for stickers are surrounded by jolly cartoon animals, foods, hearts, stars, and other illustrations—devotes an […]
Indirect Objects 