Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (35 page)

—It would be wonderful to have a dining-room table that would lift straight up and be conveyed to the kitchen on some kind of overhead rollers. In the kitchen, the dishes and leftovers could be cleared from the table. It then could be reset for dessert and returned, with another push of a button, to the dining room.

—Why don't we have dry-cleaning machines in our homes just the way we have washing machines? As far as I know, about the only difference is washing machines work with soap and water and dry-cleaning equipment uses some other fluid.

—I've always wanted a table that comes down out of the ceiling next to my side of the bed. A table big enough to hold all the things I like to keep next to me is in the way when I want to get in or out of bed. Lifting the whole mess into the ceiling is the only solution.

—I fail to understand why it's so expensive or impractical to have a swimming pool in the basement of a house. I think it's because most swimming pools are added to houses after the people who live there make big money. A basement swimming pool should be built into the house when it goes up. In the summer it would be fun to have outdoor pools in front and in back of the house so you could take advantage of the sun no matter where it was. The two pools ought to be connected by a channel, making it possible to swim from one to the other. It might be practical to cover the channel so you can walk over it.

—It certainly would be convenient if the table by the side of my big chair in the living room was equipped with faucets from which I could draw hot coffee, club soda, Coke, beer, lemonade, tea or bourbon, depending on my mood. This setup would save me a lot of trips to the refrigerator in the kitchen.

—I want a strong light in the ceiling aimed down at every chair in the house so that anyone who sits down can read easily from the chair without fussing with a lamp. I'm tired of lamps on tables next to chairs that throw a circle of light that falls eighteen inches short of covering the newspaper I'm trying to read.

—For our next kitchen floor, I'd like small tiles that sloped to a drain in the middle of the room. The kitchen floor could be washed with a hose.

—Our old refrigerator had the freezer section on top and the regular section on the bottom, which was inconvenient. Our new refrigerator has the freezer on the bottom and the regular section on top. It's an
improvement but what I want is a refrigerator/freezer that's lateral instead of up and down so that both the freezer and the normal-temperature compartments are at eye level.

—I want a little elevator or dumbwaiter in the house that goes from the basement to the kitchen and upstairs to the bedrooms. Once it gets upstairs, it would be able to traverse laterally with an opening for delivery in each room.

—Every bed should have a telephone on each side of it, not just on one side. And the television set should be installed in the ceiling.

We need some kind of official house-rating agency that would provide potential homeowners or apartment renters with hard information on the value of the property they're thinking of buying or renting.

Real estate people are often interesting and charming people but you wouldn't suggest that their word on a house they're trying to sell is always absolutely accurate. I'm not saying real estate agents lie. I'm saying that they … well, their statements about a place are … that is, when they tell you the good things they sometimes … what I'm trying to say is, they lie.

The real estate section of a newspaper would shake anyone's confidence in brokers.

“Beautifully landscaped,” for example, usually means there are two bushes in front of the house. “Wooded lot,” on the other hand, means there are two trees.

A house would be rated on as many as twenty-five major and minor features.

If a house was free of drafts, with tight windows and doors, good insulation and with a furnace big enough and good enough to warm every room, it would get a ten in the heating category.

There would be points off for drafts, rooms with radiators that are too small and for gaps in the insulation. If a house had steam heat instead of hot-water heat, it would lose five points.

Each house also would be rated for summer temperatures. If it was shaded or well insulated and air-conditioned, it would get a high hot-weather rating.

A prospective buyer would be able to get a realistic assessment of the amount of usable floor space in a house. The floor space in hallways wouldn't be counted, and any room that had to be used as a passageway to another room would lose points.

There would be major deductions if the front door opened directly into the living room instead of into a hallway.

There would be minor deductions for the following items:

—Doors that open into a room when they'd be better opening out or vice versa.

—Rain gutters that collect leaves from adjacent trees and get clogged up easily.

—A bathroom hard to find in the dark in the middle of the night.

—Misplaced and inconvenient light switches.

—A front lawn, with crabgrass, on a hill.

—A living room arranged so that when one person is watching television, everyone has to watch it, whether they want to or not,

—Cracks in the sidewalk that make it difficult to shovel after a heavy snow. A shovel should slide easily along the length of a sidewalk and not keep bumping into obstacles.

—Wet basement, leaky roof.

—Leaky attics.

—Noisy street with heavy traffic.

On the plus side, there would be bonus points for these good features if a house had them:

—Enough bathrooms for everyone at rush hour.

—A working fireplace.

—Ample electrical outlets in convenient places.

—Closet space enough for everyone and everything.

—A kitchen equipped with a big refrigerator, a good stove, plenty of counter space and two sinks so that two people can work on the dishes at the same time.

It seems likely that if a proper test and rating could be devised, it would give prospective homeowners a chance to get a fair deal. Instead of inflated prose, each house would have a rating number.

There are intangibles that would be hard to assess. Some houses have a kind of charm to which it's difficult to assign a number. In that case, a meaningful figure might be the average number of years occupants had stayed in the house. If a house is fifteen years old and has had six owners or tenants, it's probably a dog.

You want to know why we could never sell our house? I'll tell you why:

Because there are a thousand things I know about this house that no one else would ever know, that's why. You think you know how to open a door? Try our back door. You think it's easy because you have a key? Forget it. The lock on that door takes a special little twist and jerk that conies with years of experience. A stranger couldn't get into our house through that door with a ring of keys and a crowbar.

And how would anyone else know how to turn the water for the outside faucet off in the fall and on in the spring? It's a routine I've performed twice a year for thirty-five years now. (I forgot to do it twice.) I go to the back of the basement where the washer and dryer are lined up against the wall. The faucet is up between two rafters right behind the washing machine. I turn my back to the washing machine, put my hands behind me and up on the front edge of the washing machine. I give a little jump and boost myself to a sitting position on top of it. My back is to the wall but by leaning back, looking up over my head and extending my right arm up behind me, I can reach the valve handle on the pipe and turn it on.

Who else would know you have to jump up and sit on the washing machine to turn on the outside faucet?

And how would you put your car in the garage if you bought our house? Would you have any way of knowing that if you pull the car forward just to where the divider between the front and rear door of the car is exactly opposite the leaf rake hanging from a hook that you won't bump into anything at the front of the garage but will still be in far enough so you can close the door? Would you know that?

And, by the way, don't open the garage door early in the morning if someone's sleeping in the little guest room over it because the door makes a loud rumbling sound right under the bed.

Would you know that the fan in the attic lets in too much cold air when it isn't working in the winter and has to be stuffed with insulation? And if you knew that would you know the best way to climb up into the attic through the small entry over the upstairs hallway? I'm sure you wouldn't. It's by using the little ladder I keep under Brian's
bed. You wouldn't know that, would you? And anyway, if I sold the house, I'd take the ladder because I made it in 1957.

You certainly wouldn't know that when it rains steadily for a couple of days, the front part of the basement gets damp unless I put a sheet of plastic on the ground under the downspout where all the water pours out off the roof. While I'm basically an honest person, it is quite possible that if you were interested in buying my house, I wouldn't go out of my way to tell you about the damp basement.

If you don't jiggle the handle on the downstairs toilet just a little after you flush it, it keeps running. It takes a special touch to jiggle it just right.

When I come downstairs in the dark and want to turn the light on, I can put my finger on the light switch halfway down the hallway leading to the kitchen nine out of ten times without feeling for it. It's nothing I could teach anyone how to do. After thirty-seven years, I just know where every light switch is in the whole house. Every time I do it, I think what it must be like to be blind and still be able to find things.

I know our house too well to sell it. I know it's the seventh step from the top coming downstairs that creaks the most.

And if, by any chance, you did buy our house, you couldn't move in right away because it would take us at least a year to empty out the closets.

I hope it doesn't have an adverse effect on the economy of the United States, but very soon now I think I'll stop buying things. I was looking around the house last weekend and I think I have enough things to last me now.

I have my typewriters. I know for certain I don't need any more typewriters. In addition to the seventeen old Underwood No. 5's I've collected, there are two small portables in my work area in the basement and another I bought in an emergency at Sears in Indianapolis years ago. Sears had used it as a display model and sold it to me for only $59 because they couldn't find the cover to it. The typewriter works fine but, without a cover that has the handle attached to it, I can't take it anywhere.

Anyway, I've bought a computer that I write on when I take a trip because I can plug it into the telephone and send what I've written back to the office. I didn't think I'd ever use a word processor but I have, and it involves buying a lot of other things for it.

I've bought quite a bit of software that I don't know how to use. I'll start learning how to use that instead of buying anything more. I'm already at the very outer edge of my intellectual capacity for learning about computers.

It would be a good idea if I started writing more with pencils, too. Over the years I've bought a lot of pencils and I've brought a lot home from the office and, as a result, I suppose there are four hundred pencils in drawers, pockets, cabinets, car glove compartments and on the little tables next to the beds in the house.

The pencils will be good to write on all the small notepads I've got. I buy notepads and usually take the one in the hotel room next to the telephone, so I have a lot of notepads.

I'm not going to buy any more flashlights. I'll dig the ones I've bought out of the closets, fix some of them and get new batteries for the others. I have my flashlights.

While I'm not known as a clothes horse among my friends, I've bought quite a lot of clothing. I seem to be hooked on various kinds of casual jackets and sports shirts. There's what they call a factory store near us that deals in seconds and I often drop in there Saturday morning and buy a shirt of some kind. Beginning very soon now, I'm going to start wearing some of those shirts.

I have enough shoes, too. I must have six or eight pairs of those new running, walking or tennis shoes. I'm going to start wearing them regularly because, if I don't, there's still going to be a lot of good rubber left on them long after I have enough energy left to wear it off.

There are enough neckties hanging from the rack on the door of the closet to keep me properly dressed for many years to come. I must have fifty neckties, but I only wear the three I like. This is ridiculous and I'm going to start wearing the other forty-seven even though I don't like them.

Every time I go somewhere, I buy another little canvas or leather bag of some kind to bring home things that don't fit in my suitcase. I have enough little bags now, and if I go someplace I'll take one of them with me, empty, so I don't have to buy another.

I'm not going to buy any more tools. I have one of just about every tool known to man and I'll stop visiting hardware stores.

The only thing I buy more of than sports shirts and sports jackets
is wood. I have more good wood in my shop in the country and in our basement at home than I'd have time to make anything out of if I started today and worked on it for the next twenty-five years.

I have boards in the spaces between the beams under the living-room floor, on supports I've put high up on the garage walls and under the stairway leading down into the basement.

Beginning any day now, I'm going to stop buying things and start enjoying what I have.

Most mornings of my life, I arrive early in Grand Central Terminal. Grand Central is one of the most beautiful, complex and useful buildings ever built. It is a monument to our civilization. It serves hundreds of thousands of people every day, a sort of man-made beehive with people hurrying in all directions on a dozen different levels over its magnificent marble floors. A vaulted ceiling depicting what used to be called “the heavens” covers one of the greatest indoor spaces in the world, the main waiting room. It's called the main waiting room even though no one does much waiting in it.