Read I'm a Stranger Here Myself Online
Authors: Bill Bryson
I'm a Stranger Here Myself (34 page)
Today marks the third anniversary of our move to the States. It occurs to me that I have never explained in these pages why we took this momentous step and that you might wonder how we decided on it. Me, too.
What I mean by that is that I honestly don’t recall how or when we decided to transfer countries. What I can tell you is that we were living in a farming village in the comely depths of the Yorkshire Dales and, beautiful though it was and much as I enjoyed having conversations in the pub that I couldn’t begin to understand (“Aye, I been tupping sheep up on Windy Poop and it were that mucky at bottom sinkhole I couldn’t cross beck. Haven’t known it this barmish since last back end o’ wittering, and mine’s a pint of Tetley’s if you’re thinking of offering”), it was becoming increasingly impractical, as the children grew and my work took me farther afield, for us to live in an isolated spot, however gorgeous.
So we made the decision to move somewhere a little more urban and built-up. And then—this is the part that gets hazy—somehow this simple concept evolved into the notion of settling in America for a time.
Everything seemed to move very swiftly. Some people came and bought the house, I signed a lot of papers, and a small army of removal men took everything away. I can’t pretend that I didn’t know what was happening, but I can clearly recall, exactly three years ago today, waking up in a strange house in New Hampshire, looking out the window, and thinking: “What on earth am I doing here?”
I felt as if we had made a terrible mistake. I had nothing against America, you understand. It’s a wonderful country, splendid in every way. But this felt uncomfortably like a backward step—like moving in with one’s parents in middle age. They may be perfectly delightful people, but you just don’t want to live with them any longer. Your life has moved on. I felt like that about a nation.
As I stood there in a state of unfolding dismay, my wife came in from an exploratory stroll around the neighborhood. “Oh, it’s
wonderful,
” she cooed. “The people are so friendly, the weather is glorious, and you can walk anywhere you want without having to look out for cow pies.”
“Everything you could want in a country,” I remarked queasily.
“Yes,” she said, and meant it.
She was smitten, and remains so, and I can understand that. There is a great deal about America that is deeply appealing. There are all the obvious things that outsiders always remark on—the ease and convenience of life, the friendliness of the people, the astoundingly abundant portions, the intoxicating sense of space, the cheerfulness of nearly everyone who serves you, the notion that almost any desire or whim can be simply and instantly gratified.
My problem was that I had grown up with all this, so it didn’t fill me with quite the same sense of novelty and wonder. I failed to be enchanted, for instance, when people urged me to have a nice day.
“They don’t actually care what kind of day you have,” I would explain to my wife. “It’s just a reflex.”
“I know,” she would say, “but it’s still nice.”
And of course she was right. It may be an essentially empty gesture, but at least it springs from the right impulse.
As time has passed, much of this has grown on me as well. As one of nature’s great skinflints, I am much taken with all the free stuff in America—free parking, free book matches, free refills of coffee and soft drinks, free basket of candy by the cash register in restaurants and cafes. Buy a dinner at one of our local restaurants and you get a free ticket to the movies. At our photocopying shop there is a table along one wall that is cluttered with free things to which you can help yourself— pots of glue, stapler, Scotch tape, a guillotine for neatening edges, boxes of rubber bands and paper clips. You don’t have to pay an extra fee for any of this or even be a customer. It’s just there for anyone who wants to wander in and use it. In Yorkshire we sometimes went to a baker’s where you had to pay an extra penny—a penny!—if you wanted your loaf of bread sliced. It’s hard not to be charmed by the contrast.
Much the same could be said of the American attitude to life, which, generally speaking, is remarkably upbeat and lacking in negativity—a characteristic that I tend to take for granted when I am in the States but am reminded of not infrequently in Britain. The last time I arrived at Heathrow Airport, for instance, the official who checked my passport looked me over and asked: “Are you that writer chap?”
I was very pleased, as you can imagine, to be recognized. “Why, yes I am,” I said proudly.
“Come over here to make some more money, have you?” he said with disdain and slid back my passport.
You don’t get much of that in the States. By and large, people have an almost instinctively positive attitude to life and its possibilities. If you informed an American that a massive asteroid was hurtling toward Earth at 125,000 miles an hour and that in twelve weeks the planet would be blown to smithereens, he would say: “Really? In that case, I suppose I’d better sign up for that Mediterranean cooking course now.”
If you informed a Briton of the same thing, he would say: “Bloody typical, isn’t it? And have you seen the weather forecast for the weekend?”
I asked my wife the other day if she would ever be ready to go back to England.
“Oh, yes,” she said without hesitation.
“When?”
“One day.”
I nodded, and I must say I felt exactly the same. I miss England. I liked it there. There was something about it that just suited me. But if we were to leave America now, I would miss it, too, and a very great deal more than I would have thought possible three years ago. It’s a wonderful country, and my wife was certainly right about one thing. It’s nice not to have to watch out for cow pies.
Now please—and I really mean this—have a nice day.
BY BILL BRYSON
THE LOST CONTINENT
MOTHER TONGUE
NEITHER HERE NOR THERE
MADE IN AMERICA
NOTES FROM A SMALL ISLAND
A WALK IN THE WOODS
DON’T MISS
IN A SUNBURNED COUNTRY,
BILL BRYSON’S ADVENTURE DOWN UNDER
Trading Little Debbies for Vegemite, Bill Bryson hops from Bondi Beach to the outback for a brilliantly comic take on Australia.
Praise for Bill Bryson:
“Bill Bryson is great company
. . . equal parts Garrison Keillor,
Michael Kinsley, and Dave Barry.”
—
The New York Times Book Review
AND BEAR IN MIND . . .
A Walk in the Woods
, the runaway
New York Times
bestseller
“A funny book, full of humor. . . . The reader is rarely anything but exhilarated.”
—
The New York Times
“A laugh-out-loud account.”
—
National Geographic Traveler
BROADWAY BOOKS
Go to the Next Page to Read Chapter 7 from
Bill Bryson’s
At Home
Coming in October 2010
An Excerpt from Bill Bryson’s At Home
THE DRAWING ROOM
I
If you had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly. Until the eighteenth century, the idea of having comfort at home was so unfamiliar that no word existed for the condition.
Comfortable
meant merely “capable of being consoled.” Comfort was something you gave to the wounded or distressed. The first person to use the word in its modern sense was the writer Horace Walpole, who remarked in a letter to a friend in 1770 that a certain Mrs. White was looking after him well and making him “as comfortable as is possible.” By the early nineteenth century, everyone was talking about having a comfortable home or enjoying a comfortable living, but before Walpole’s day no one did.
Nowhere in the house is the spirit (if not always the actuality) of comfort better captured than in the curiously named room in which we find ourselves now, the drawing room. The term is a shortening of the much older
withdrawing room
, meaning a space where the family could withdraw from the rest of the household for greater privacy, and it has never settled altogether comfortably into widespread English usage. For a time in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
drawing room
was challenged in more refined circles by the French
salon
, which was sometimes anglicized to
saloon
, but both those words gradually became associated with spaces outside the home, so that
saloon
came first to signify a room for socializing in a hotel or on a ship, then a place for dedicated drinking, and finally, and a little unexpectedly, a type of automobile.
Salon
, meanwhile, became indelibly attached to places associated with artistic endeavors before being appropriated (from about 1910) by providers of hair care and beauty treatments.
Parlor
, the word long favored by Americans for the main room of the home, has a kind of nineteenth-century frontier feel to it, but in fact is the oldest word of all. It was first used in 1225, referring to a room where monks could go to talk (it is from the French
parler
, “to speak”), and was extended to secular contexts by the last quarter of the following century.
Drawing room
is the name used by Edward Tull on his floorplan of the Old Rectory, and almost certainly is the term employed by the well-bred Mr. Marsham, though he was probably in a minority even then. By mid-century it was being supplanted in all but the most genteel circles by
sitting room
, a term first appearing in English in 1806. A later challenger was
lounge
, which originally signified a type of chair or sofa, then a jacket for relaxing in, and finally, from 1881, a room. In America,
living room
came into being in about 1870, and quite rapidly drove
parlor
out of use there, but failed to catch on elsewhere.
Assuming he was a conventional sort of fellow, Mr. Marsham would have strived to make his drawing room the most comfortable room in the house, with the softest and finest furnishings. In practice, however, it was probably anything but comfortable for much of the year, since it has just one fireplace, which could do no more than warm a small, central part of the room. Even with a good fire going, I can attest, it is possible in the depths of winter to stand across the room and see your breath.
