You Had to Be There

von Sue Ellen Tarrant

166 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Somebody at the table is being genuinely polite while you explain something, and you can see the exact moment it stops landing.You told them you had to be home to receive a phone call. They heard: an inconvenience, since solved. They are completely right about the facts and they have missed the entire thing, which is that a whole evening could be organized around a ringing sound that had not happened yet, and that everyone you knew lived that way, and that nobody thought it was strange.You Had to Be There is 101 things that were perfectly ordinary and are now impossible to explain - not because they were better, but because the whole world that made them make sense has been taken away. It is not a birthday-year book and it does not belong to one generation. If you were there for the before, this one is yours.What's inside: - A Sunday afternoon with nothing in it, and the particular weight of that boredom- Standing at a bus stop with no dot moving toward you on any map- Allow several weeks for delivery, and the small unmarked grave when it never came- The glove compartment full of maps, and turning left where the barn used to be- Calling a house instead of a person, and whoever answered taking the message- Letting it ring twenty times, because there was nowhere else for it to go- An argument nobody could settle, and a thing you therefore believed for thirty years- Twenty-four chances on a roll of film, and the envelope opened in the parking lot- Being home at eight because the television said eight- Carbon paper, correction fluid, and the fourth copy nobody could read- Five o'clock, and the fact that it genuinely ended things- Leaving the house and simply being gonePlus a closing section on what we traded, which is honest about the fact that most of it should not come back.This is not a lecture about how everything used to be better. Several entries cheerfully admit the old way was worse, and younger readers are the audience for the joke rather than the target of it.Perfect for: a birthday for anyone over forty-five, a retirement, Christmas, Father's Day, Mother's Day, the relative who is impossible to buy for, and the guest bathroom, which is the highest honor a book like this can receive.

• Themen: Ratgeber Familie und Gesundheit Themen und Fragen
• ISBN: 9784784483631
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 04.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Sue Ellen Tarrant