One day Dad gave all three of us kids a bed-making lesson. Not about how to pull up the bedspread and neaten the bed after you’d gotten up in the morning. We already knew that, and were supposed to do it every day. No, the real deal — stripping the bed down to the bare mattress and then putting on fresh sheets and making the bed up anew.
Dad told us that we were lucky that there was now such a thing as a fitted sheet, whose elastic corners slipped under the mattress corners to keep itself in place. Before the invention of the fitted version, the bottom sheet would have been flat, just like the top sheet. To make up a neat bed back in those old days, he told us, it was essential to know how to make really tight folds at the four corners of the bottom sheet. Such tight folds were called “hospital corners” for reasons that Dad did not know but that can now be found on the internet. He also told us that, when he was in the Navy, the quality of one’s hospital corners was assessed by whether a superior officer could bounce a quarter off the bottom sheet; if so, one could continue making up the bed; if not, well …
Lest we think that hospital corners were mere relics of the past, Dad also told us that the two folds of the top sheet at the foot of the bed — our beds — needed to be tight as well. And so, he taught us what to do.
Every time I’ve changed the sheets on a bed, this lesson has come back to me as I’ve attended to those two folds. What doesn’t come back is whether we demanded — and Dad provided — a demonstration of a bouncing quarter.