When I was about 16 years old, my brother and I both slept on the third floor of the family home, his room next to mine. One cold winter, we were freezing cold up there -- particularly because my father turned off the heat at night. We went to my dad and complained.
"Could you leave the heat on?" I asked. "We're freezing on the third floor."
"Too bad," my father replied. "Heat costs money."
The cold didn't bother him. Dad was on the second floor, and he had a massive down-filled duvet on his bed. My mother had her own separate bedroom.
"Well, could you get us blankets, or something?"
We each hardly had any blankets at all - thin and nowhere near adequate.
"Buy your own blankets, if you're cold," my father answered.
He laughed and his eyes sparkled throughout this brief conversation, as though this were the funniest situation in the world. We were being very silly. Why should we expect anything from him? And really, it was a good question. Why should we expect anything from him at all? For that matter, why should we expect anything from either of our parents?
Eventually, I bought a massive old TV -- the kind that runs on vacuum tubes. When it was on, it ran hot. I used this as a furnace to heat my room. And I probably bathed nightly in dangerous levels of radiation.
When the TV wasn't good enough, I saved up some money and bought a small electric heater. My father complained a little -- this was going to raise his electricity bill. But he wasn't about to take away something I bought for myself.
I don't know how my brother dealt with the cold. In our house, it was ever children.
