Writers Workshop: The Great Indoors

The year is half over, and I can count the number of times I’ve been out of the house on one hand.

A couple of years ago, this would bother me greatly, but now, I’m just used to it.

Rex Stout had a character named Nero Wolfe, who was an armchair detective; in fact, he rarely left his house, leaving the legwork to his assistant, Archie Goodwin.

Wolfe lived in a luxurious brownstone building on West 35th Street in New York, which is where you find a lot of brownstones; based on this article I read on the Apartment Therapy website, I’d say they would be my kind of place to live.

I did some work for a lawyer a few years ago, and his offices and living quarters were in the rough equivalent of a brownstone, and yes, it was quite luxurious, although what would be the living room was his operations center; his bedroom was the entire third floor, which was the uppermost.

I guess most of the brownstones in New York are four stories, including a ground floor as you walked in; if you ever watched The Nanny, I believe the Sheffields lived in one, and it was very luxurious.

Today is Bastille Day, the day in 1789 when French peasants stormed the Bastille and started the French Revolution; it’s also Grandma Holton’s 122nd birthday (she passed away in 1992), meaning she was born 111 years after the storming of the Bastille, which puts everything into perspective.

Grandma loved the Nero Wolfe books, as did my father (no doubt she had a lot to do with that), which explains how this started out; happy birthday, Grandma!