Trading Stories

Books, and the stories they contained, were the only things I felt I was able to possess as a child. Even then, the possession was not literal; my father is a librarian, and perhaps because he believed in collective property, or perhaps because my parents considered buying books for me an extravagance, or perhaps because people generally acquired less then than they do now, I had almost no books to call my own. I remember coveting and eventually being permitted to own a book for the first time. I was five or six. The book was diminutive, about four inches square, and was called “You’ll Never Have to Look for Friends.” It lived among the penny candy and the Wacky Packs at the old-fashioned general store across the street from our first house in Rhode Island. The plot was trite, more an extended greeting card than a story. But I remember the excitement of watching my mother purchase it for me and of bringing it home. Inside the front cover, beneath the declaration “This book is especially for,” was a line on which to write my name. My mother did so, and also wrote the word “mother” to indicate that the book had been given to me by her, though I did not call her Mother but Ma. “Mother” was an alternate guardian. But she had given me a book that, nearly forty years later, still dwells on a bookcase in my childhood room.

Our house was not devoid of things to read, but the offerings felt scant, and were of little interest to me. There were books about China and Russia that my father read for his graduate studies in political science, and issues of Time that he read to relax. My mother owned novels and short stories and stacks of a literary magazine called Desh , but they were in Bengali, even the titles illegible to me. She kept her reading material on metal shelves in the basement, or off limits by her bedside. I remember a yellow volume of lyrics by the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, which seemed to be a holy text to her, and a thick, fraying English dictionary with a maroon cover that was pulled out for Scrabble games. At one point, we bought the first few volumes of a set of encyclopedias that the supermarket where we shopped was promoting, but we never got them all. There was an arbitrary, haphazard quality to the books in our house, as there was to certain other aspects of our material lives. I craved the opposite: a house where books were a solid presence, piled on every surface and cheerfully lining the walls. At times, my family’s effort to fill our house with books seemed thwarted; this was the case when my father mounted rods and brackets to hold a set of olive-green shelves. Within a few days the shelves collapsed, the Sheetrocked walls of our seventies-era Colonial unable to support them.

Breathtaking Bungalows « Whirl Magazine

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The history of the bungalow dates back to 18th century India. First seen as native housing in the region, the diverse one-story, thatched-roof abode was adapted by British colonial administrators into houses and summer retreats in the Himalayas. But it wasn’t until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that bungalows reached the shores of America. Today, we see bungalows and their distinct architecture restored all over town. The “every man” house of the past is the architectural beauty of the present.

Sitting on its own plot of land, a bungalow represented living close to nature, often surrounded by a garden, however small. Today, we closely associate bungalows with beach vacation homes or resort living. But originally the iconic features of bungalows — style, simplicity, convenience, and solid construction — provided respectability for new homeowners across the country. “Bungalows also have the advantage of being more private,” says Arthur Lubetz, principal at Front Studio Architects. “Being on one floor, if you plant a tree, it doesn’t take long to grow to shade the house or to make it so that you can’t see the next house so easily.”

The definition of a bungalow is explicit in most dictionaries as a one- or one-and-a-half story dwelling. But in their book, American Bungalow Style, authors Robert Winter and Alexander Vertikoff identify more than a dozen variations on the traditional bungalow form. They range from Craftsman Bungalows to Spanish Revival Bungalows. But all bungalows have several features in common: Most of the living spaces are on the ground floor, they have a low-pitched roof and a horizontal shape, the living room is at the center, connecting rooms are without hallways, and efficient floor plans are throughout.

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