'Hunters' brings back memories

Maybe I watch too much HGTV.
No, strike that.
I definitely watch too much HGTV.
And usually at some point each week, between NFL games and IU basketball games, I find myself sitting through at least part of an episode of “House Hunters.”
And on nearly every occasion, I hear the couple looking for a house, whether it’s in Dubuque or Dallas or Dubai, utter the words, “It’s a little small.”
For all I know, that’s part of the script that the amateur actors are supposed to use during this particular version of reality television.
But it’s also part of the modern American mindset, and it makes me wonder sometimes how I survived the deprivations of my childhood.
After all, when you listen to TV house hunters who can’t fathom the idea of a bathroom without two sinks, you begin to wonder if you were raised on a different planet.
I grew up in the 1950s in a big old house on Pleasant Street. My grandparents built the house about 1900, but 50 years later it wasn’t all that much different from the day they moved in.
There were, to be sure, a few modern conveniences. But the house was a product of its era, and it wasn’t an era involving double-sink bathrooms.
In fact, little things like heat on the second floor could be hard to come by.
(It has long struck me as remarkable that we were taught to use the name “register” to describe what was essentially a hole in the floor. Heat would rise, or some of it would, and the “register” allowed it to get to the second floor. Has there ever been a more formal-sounding name for such a low-tech innovation?)
At that house on Pleasant Street, the most effective registers — which apparently had real ductwork leading to the furnace in the basement — were in the hallway and the upstairs bathroom.
That was the only full bath in the house, and on a typical school day morning it was a hive of activity.
There were six of us when I was a kid, and though my mother rose early and was downstairs in the kitchen, that still meant five of us had to get ready for the day simultaneously.
With a few allowances for modesty as the kids moved into adolescence, a typical winter morning when I was about seven years old looked something like this: One kid was in the shower, one kid was on the toilet, one kid was brushing teeth, my father was trying to shave with his trusty Norelco, and one kid was sitting on a chair in front of that beloved, functioning register that pumped out warmth.
In some ways, it’s a wonder we needed heat at all with five people bustling about in such a small space.
Would a second sink have helped? I don’t think so.

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