Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [78]
I like to have the windows covered so the neighbors can’t see in and I agree you shouldn’t just cover them with newspaper but it’s very easy to carry curtains too far. When strangers come into your living room and say right away how nice the curtains are, then you know you’ve gone too far with the curtains. Friends who come to your house once in a while should not be able to remember what the curtains look like.
It must be difficult to sell furniture. No one in a store would sell you a chair in which the springs were beginning to sag but most chairs aren’t very comfortable until that begins to happen. No one wants to pay a lot of money for a secondhand piece of furniture and yet furniture looks better when it has a well-worn look.
A Nest to Come Home To 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 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 glass, 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 circumstances 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 space 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 space to operate with a bread knife.
In addition to running out of counter space, 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 space for pots and pans under the counter, but that was five years ago. The pots have expanded to fit the space 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