Only when the door is open does the family realize no one is in danger. Thurber’s father wakes up to commotion and thinks the house must be on fire. Thurber’s mother heads to the attic, but the door is stuck. Briggs tries to stumble to an open window but finds a closed one and smashes it open in the confusion. Thurber wakes up on the floor, under his bed, and imagines he’s been buried. He sniffs a bottle of camphor he keeps by his bed to revive himself. A cousin, Briggs, groggily decides his worst fear has come true and he is suffocating in his sleep. The noise also wakes several other members of the family. Thurber’s mother wakes up, convinced the attic bed has fallen on Thurber’s father. That night, Thurber, who sleeps on an old army cot, rolls too close to the edge of the bed and it tips him over with a crash. Thurber’s mother fears the old bed up there is not safe to sleep in and might collapse in the night. In Chapter One, “The Night the Bed Fell,” Thurber’s father decides to sleep in a spare bed in the attic, where he can enjoy some peace and quiet. Thurber was a celebrated American cartoonist, journalist, and writer, known for his deadpan sense of humor. Thurber also provided pen-and-ink illustrations to accompany the text. It details the eccentricities and unusual goings-on that surrounded a young Thurber growing up in Columbus, Ohio, around the time of World War I. My Life and Hard Times is a 1933 comical memoir from humorist James Thurber.
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