137: The Book That Changed Your Life

23:53Gretchen took the book and hid it under the carpet of her bedroom, where it was discovered by our housekeeper, Lena, who eventually handed it over to her mother. I'll make sure this is properly disposed of, my mother said, hurrying down the hallway to her bedroom. Penetration, she laughed, reading out loud from a randomly selected page. Oh, this ought to be good.

24:24Weeks later, Gretchen and I found the book hidden between the mattress and box springs of my parents' bed. The pages stained with coffee rings and cigarette ash. The discovery seemed to validate all of Gretchen's suspicions. They'll be coming for us any day now, she warned. Be prepared, my friend, because this time they'll be playing for keeps. We waited. I'd always made it a point to kiss my mother before going to bed, but not anymore. The feel of her hand on my shoulder now made my flesh crawl. She was hemming a pair of my pants one afternoon when, standing before her on a kitchen chair, I felt her hands graze my butt.

25:07I just want to be friends, I stammered. Nothing more, nothing less. She took the pins out of her mouth and studied me for a moment before sighing. Damn, and here you've been leading me on all this time. I read the book once more, hoping to recapture my earlier pleasure. but it was too late now. I couldn't read the phrase, he paunched his daughter's rock-hard nopples, without thinking of Gretchen barricading herself in the bedroom. I thought I might throw the book away or maybe even burn it, but like a perfectly good outgrown sweater, it seemed a shame to destroy it when the world was full of people who might get some use out of it.

25:49With this in mind, I carried the book to the grocery store parking lot and tossed it into the back of a shining new pickup truck. I then took up my post beside the store's outdoor venting machines, waiting until the truck's owner returned pushing a cart full of groceries. He was a wiry man with fashionable mutton-chopped sideburns and a half-cast on his arm. As he placed his bags into the back of the truck, his eyes narrowed upon the book. I watched as he picked it up and leafed through the first few pages before raising his head to search the parking lot. He took a cigarette from his pocket and tapped it against the roof of the truck before lighting it.

26:29Then he slipped a book into his pocket and drove away.

26:43David Sedaris. The story appears in his book, Naked. His latest book is called The Land and Its People. Coming up, the frontier. Then, and then. That's in a minute. I'm Chicago Public Radio. When our program continues. Support for This American Life comes from GoodRx. This allergy season, the whole family can get relief without overpaying. Seasonal allergy medication starts at just$10 with GoodRx. GoodRx lets you compare prescription prices at over 70 ,000 pharmacies and instantly find discounts up to 80%. GoodRx is not insurance, but even if you have insurance or Medicare, GoodRx may beat your copay.

27:24Get allergy savings on the GoodRx app or go to goodrx.com slash T-A-L. Support for This American Life and the following message come from Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you are probably multitasking. Are you scrolling home listings on Redfin? Saving homes that you don't really expect to get. Redfin wants you to know that they are not just built for endless scrolling. They really are built to help you find and own a home. Redfin agents close twice as many deals as other agents. So when you find the one, you've got a shot at getting it. Get started at redfin.com. Own the dream.

28:05Support for This American Life comes from Wise, the app for international people using money around the globe. You can send, spend, and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart. Get Wise. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's This American Life, Am I or Glass. Each week on a program, of course, we choose a theme, bringing a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program is a rerun, the book that changed my life. We've arrived at Act 3 of our show, Act 3, Roger and me, Lewis and Clark. There's book as literature, there's book as filth, and then there's book as pure physical object.

28:45This is the story of somebody for whom a book changed his life, though it is almost random that it happened at all, that he got to know this book in the first place. Jeremy Goldstein tells the story. Roger was 34, working in construction and looking for things to do in his spare time. And one day he noticed this plate he'd been given by his grandmother, a plate from a 1905 fair celebrating the centennial of Lewis and Clark's expedition to explore the western frontier. He looked at the plate and wondered if there was anything else left from the fair still around. It turned out there was a lot. and he started buying it up.

29:19It was a fun hobby, collecting the various memorabilia from that fair. But when you reach a point where I had about 1 ,100 items, one of the larger collections known, it was, you know, the end of the treasure hunt. And I couldn't find anything I didn't have. And somebody mentioned, well, why don't you collect books about Lewis and Clark? I thought, well, that might be kind of fun to do.

29:48So in 1984, he went to a book dealer in Vancouver and picked out an 80-year-old set of books that chronicled Lewis and Clark's expedition. The price? $695. I had a difficult time writing out that check because at that time, in fact, I really didn't know much about books. I proceeded to take that set of books downtown in Portland to an established book dealer whose name was Prest McMahon, and I showed him the set. I said, well, that's it, isn't it? That's all the journals. And he kind of chuckled. He said, no, there's a lot more publications than that about the journals of Lewis and Clark. And so I went ahead and said, well, I tell you what.

30:32I said, you give me about five years, I'm going to have every book published about Lewis and Clark. And he laughed so hard he about laughed himself out of his chair.

30:46He was a heavy-set gentleman in his late 60s at the time. And he said, there's people that have spent lifetimes looking for every book of Lewis and Clark and have never succeeded. Well, I told him, well, maybe I won't have every book, but I'll have the best library of anybody in the United States. And he laughed harder.

31:13Strange as it may sound, this is all it took to send Roger on his path of amassing, in just 14 years, what did become the largest known private collection of Lewis and Clark books in the United States. And all this time he kept working in construction, excavating landscapes, laying pipes for sewers and paving roads. A decent living, but it was never enough. anything after house payment and basic expenses for living would go toward buying books. I would have to work 10 to 12 hours a day, normally six days a week. Some summers I wouldn't take a day off just so that I could work and have a little better check so maybe I could get that next book or make that other credit card payment because I was now beyond my means.

32:02At one point, Roger had 12 credit cards. And then, of course, I had a house I could refinance, which I did three times. I don't know how to explain it exactly, but if there was a book out there that I didn't have, I would find the means to acquire it.

32:25When you get something in the 18th, 19th century, you open up the book and you look at the discoloration of the pages and the smell. And that's when you really feel the true energy of history. Not what you would read, but you've got more senses than just your eyes. You can smell, you can feel, you can touch.

33:06This actually points to one of the strangest things about Roger's relationship with his collection. He knew all about the different Lewis and Clark books, marbled endpapers, obscure hand-tinted plates, and the value of original boards. But Roger never became an expert on what was inside the books. He didn't collect books to read them. He just wanted to own them.

33:30It turns out that your life can be changed by books you didn't even read. In fact, Roger had never been a reader of books. He didn't read books as a kid. He didn't go to college. And his reading habits didn't change as an adult when his house was full of books. As a collector, Roger was undeterred and he was methodical. But after 10 years, one book still eluded him. It's the cornerstone of any serious Lewis and Clark collection, a first edition copy of the first official account of the expedition. It's a two-volume set, published in 1814. Fewer than 1 ,500 copies were ever printed. But the price tag, often around$10 ,000, had always scared Roger off.

34:10Then in 1994, he took a$49 flight to Los Angeles for the L.A. Book Fair. That particular day, I got there early. and then there was somewhat of a race when they opened up the gate they would actually have to stand slow down slow down don't run it was like kids running running for the opening of a carnival i sauntered just casually i didn't run to william reese's booth and introduced myself oh yeah hi roger and and uh i says did you bring anything about Lewis and Clark with you. He turned and looked toward the glass case. And there are sets, a two-volume set of 1814, Lewis and Clark journals. And this set was beautiful.

34:59And I was just, oh, I was shaking. I wanted this set so bad. And I looked at him and I said, what, what, what do you, what, what's the price? Bill said, well,$12 ,500. I was crushed. I knew it was beyond me.

35:30You know, so as I kind of backed away and started to walk away from the booth, just knowing, shaking my head to myself, I can't afford them. There's no way I can get, I've got to have this set of books. somehow I've got it I can't afford these books I can't there's no way I gotta have this set of books how the hell can I do it she's I better go to the bar I walked to the bar got a shot of scotch

36:01I walked back to the booth with my scotch in hand and I I can I look at those again And Bill, yeah, sure. Took them off the shelf, set them on the counter. He says, well, Roger, what can you afford? I says, I don't know. I says, we're not working. This is a slow time of the year. I might be able to do$1 ,000 a month, but Bill, you know, we're not working now. I don't know, maybe in May or June, you know, when we start working overtime. And he said, well, do you want them? And I said, yeah, but gosh, I can't. And before I could finish the conversation, Mr. Reese had turned around and took these books, put them in the bag, wrapped them up, turned around, put out his hand and shook my hand and said, that sounds good enough to me.

37:07The 1814 became Roger's calling card. It established him as an expert in all things written about Lewis and Clark. And then something happened. Roger started to read his books. Before this, he'd occasionally pull out a book and read a random passage. But now he started to plow through whole books front to back. Now it's my time to study the books. Let's look at this book that's in front of me. I've got it open to, just by chance, a passage that brings a lot of pleasure to me. The passage comes about halfway through the expedition. After 18 months of looking for a route to the ocean, they finally reach the Pacific.

37:47And here they finally, we are in view of the ocean, this great Pacific ocean, which we have so long anxious to see. The roaring and the noise made by the waves, breaking on the rocky shores, may be heard distinctly, ocean in view, oh, the joy. So in this passage, place yourself on the banks of the Columbia River looking out toward the ocean. You know, I mean, you know, I'd be jumping up and down screaming, where is that gill of whiskey, which they didn't have at that time, unfortunately. I mean, they would have taken a gallon and all chugged it, and they'd have just been sloshed on the banks and just partying forever.

38:32I mean, it's great. What a feeling of success. It just brings a great pleasure to myself. Ocean and view, oh the joy.

38:54Last week, Roger made a pilgrimage of sorts to see, for the first time, the original handwritten journals that Lewis and Clark kept during their expedition. They're the books that everything Roger ever bought are descended from. Most of the journals are stored at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. They're in remarkable condition. As a librarian turned the book's crisp pages for Roger, flipping past detailed maps and intricate drawings of animals, Roger barely moved or spoke. This is Clark's map of Great Falls of the Columbia. You're seeing it upside down. At one point, Roger asked, could he touch them?

39:33He was told no. And after less than an hour with the journals, we wandered back into the library's main reading room. The book has altered my life from being a manual laborer to being a scholar of knowledge from the interior of the book.

40:03Stephen Beckham, a professor at Lewis and Clark, once said that, well, Roger, you can't put yourself down for being a construction foreman. And he said, that's a school of another type. He says, you know, I love school and I love education. And he says, and now that you're entering that field with us, he says, I have great respect for what you've done and what you know. And it makes me feel great.

40:30In the years since Roger began collecting, the value of all things Lewis and Clark has soared. Stephen Ambrose wrote a popular book on daunted courage. Ken Burns did a documentary. These fueled the fire. And last fall, Roger arranged for Lewis and Clark College in Portland to purchase his entire collection for what amounts to a small fortune. He promptly retired from construction at the age of 54. I just smiled. I just smiled. And I walked in, sat down, leaned back in the chair, and thought, wow, a whole new life. I don't have an alarm clock now. I mean, I've got one, but it's not in use. When my body says to get up in the morning, I get up.

41:17I stretch, do some light exercises, have a nice relaxing breakfast. Any of those in construction industry now listening to this, eat your hearts out. Most of Roger's days are now spent in the library of Lewis and Clark College, where Doug Erickson is the chief archivist. Roger's known him for years. You know, Roger would oftentimes get off of work when he was still working construction and not even clean up and come over to Lewis and Clark and spend time with me. And we'd chat and talk about books, go on the Internet and look at books on Lewis and Clark and other things. But he was tired. He was very tired and he looked like, you know, he'd just gone through a hard day of labor on a construction site.

42:03Now you see Roger, he strolls in sometime in the morning whenever he feels like it. He walks in feeling like a king. and then I usually go up to the Heritage Room and I just sit there and immerse myself into that. And of course I'm surrounded by the books. It's a wonderful feeling being in there. And he goes up there and he works. And every couple of, oh, every hour or two, he'll come down all excited. Doug, you've got to come here and see this. And I'll come upstairs and he'll show me something and we'll get excited about it. And I see him in the Heritage Room for many years to come, writing books and having people coming and talk to him and just enjoying the rest of his life.

42:52That story by Jeremy Goldstein. In 2023, years after we first broadcast this story, Roger Wendler died. Before he did, he wrote a book called Shotgun on My Chest, memoirs of a Lewis and Clark book collector.

43:12Act four, Little Sod Houses for you and me. When you really love a book, what exactly are you supposed to do with that feeling after you've finished reading the book and then perhaps finish reading about the book? If you feel strongly enough about the book, I think there is this impulse to somehow get closer to the book, to somehow try and conjure the world of the book right here in the real world somehow. So if you read about a Broadway playwright, maybe you move to New York City and start writing plays. Or if you already live in New York City, but the book takes place somewhere else, you head out there.

43:44Megan Daum has this story. I'm moving to Nebraska. No one understands why. I've lived in New York City for seven years, which is essentially all of my adult life. And a few months ago, I started making plans to head out west. Not all the way west, to California or Oregon, which people from around here might understand, but to the Great Plains. I wanted to move someplace flat and treeless, someplace that gives off a sense of how big this country used to be before automobiles and the jet age, before you could be cavalier about traveling from one place to another. There are a lot of reasons behind my move, but one of the reasons has to do with a book.

44:25With nine books, as a matter of fact. They are the books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder about her childhood as a pioneer girl on the vast Midwestern prairie in the late 1800s. When I was a little girl, growing up nearly 100 years later in the 1970s, I wanted to be like Laura so much that I made my mother sew me a sunbonnet, which I wore constantly. Like Laura, I wore my hair in braids. Before I knew how to write, I drew picture books featuring the entire Ingalls family. It was always a variation on the same theme. A family moves to a new home, encounters hardships, and through a particular combination of self-reliance and hard work, makes a life for themselves in the new place.

45:08A place so remote, so unsettled, so cold, that no civilization, not even most Indians, had ever dared to live there. To me, this kind of uncharted life was the best kind to have. And it was even better that it required a sun bonnet.

45:31She taught at three schools. The first one was the Brewster School, and that's where Almanzo would take her down and pick her up. It was about 12 miles to the southwest. I'm in DeSmet, South Dakota, riding a horse-drawn wagon around the actual land that the Ingalls lived on. Our tour guide is Tim Sullivan. Tim and his wife, Joan, own the 154 acres of land that Laura's father, Charles Ingalls, claimed in 1880 as part of the Homestead Act. This is an old trapper's cabin that we're going to fix up. We haven't gotten it done. That's the only thing we haven't gotten done. A lot of people think the Ingalls are from Walnut Grove, Minnesota, because that's where the television series was set.

46:12But in fact, they only lived there for a few years. Laura came to Dismet in 1879, when she was 12. It was where she grew up, became a school teacher, and met and married Almanza Wilder. Six of her books are set there. For those who remember, it's the place where Laura and her sister Mary, who was blind, got lost in the tall, wet grasses known as the Big Slough. It's the place where the family survived the long winter, and it was the place she always considered home. So when she talked about walking through the cool ground, walking to the Perry School, if you can see when we're going home, it's wet there.

46:50That's why it would have been cool.

46:54There's a certain kind of town that is defined solely by one industry, like steel towns, where at least one member of every family works in the mill. De Smet is sort of like that too, except the industry is a series of books. Every year for the past 29 years, the townspeople have put on a pageant based on Laura's life. Just about everyone in this town of 1 ,200 has participated in the pageant, or at least had one family member who was put on 1880-style clothing at one time or another and given tours at the museum or given some hapless tourist directions to the cemetery where caravans of family cars wind around the grounds looking for the burial sites of Charles, Caroline, Mary, Carrie, and Grace Ingalls.

47:38Almost every establishment in DeSmet, even the local bar, has restrooms labeled Ma and Pa.

47:52But even though De Smet is, for all intents and purposes, a tourist town, it doesn't feel like one. Instead, it feels like a town with a hobby, a place where a lot of people devote a lot of time to one particular idea. The tourists, though they're greeted in that typically warm, Midwestern way, feel almost incidental to the larger cause of celebrating Laura. I talked to a man who had acted in the pageant for 27 years, missing only two performances the whole time, one of them because of a combine accident in which he lost his finger and his son was impaled and almost died. He was back on stage the next night.

48:30His wife, Ildina, had driven them to the hospital and witnessed a pretty gory series of medical procedures performed, by the way, without anesthesia. The night of the accident, her husband had one request of her. He says, well, you have to go on. I was playing Ma at the time, and so I did perform that night. And I think I was probably in shock myself because it went fairly well. But it was on Sunday night is where I kind of fell apart. I did it, but I forgot a few lines. But we made it.

49:07Laura's books have a lot to do with the notion of rising to the occasion, and the pageant demands countless hours of volunteer effort, cooperation, and manual labor done without complaint. In a way, this kind of idyllic, romantic work ethic is not what I expected when I came to De Smet. Or, I should say, it is what I expected, and that's what took me by surprise. Traditionally in a story like this, the writer goes to the place she's dreamt of and finds that it's not like what she imagined at all. But the remarkable thing about De Smet is that it really is the little town on the prairie. The people are a bit like the people in Laura's books.

49:45They're proud of the land they live on, and in a strange way, it's as if Laura's powers of description have affected the way they talk about the place. And it's beautiful out here in the prairie this evening looking at the big slough. Heard of cattle over there. I think it looks just like it did in Laura's day. Not all the buildings on the other side, but the big slough is the same. I like the way the blackbirds swing in the reeds, the way the cattails bloom, the puddles of water. Sometimes ducks and geese come in and land. Marion Kramer is the author of the Laura Ingalls Wilder pageant. We're sitting at a picnic table on the Ingalls homestead.

50:27A busy day of tourism is winding down. Visitors are getting back in their minivans. Tim Sullivan's eight-year-old son, Brian, is assembling his costume for the pageant dress rehearsal. Marion is 65. So how much different was your life from Laura's when you were reading these books? Well, I guess my childhood was before electricity, before running water. And I lived on a working farm and there were chores. There was responsibility. That's why I liked the Laura books so well, because Laura had to do the same things I had to do. We had cattle and hogs and sheep, and we grew wheat and corn. It was a wonderful time.

51:11Family was very important. Life seemed simpler then because we didn't do so many things and go so much, but I'm not sure that it was.

51:29Do you remember when you first got electricity and water? And what was that like? Well, it was just lovely. We had electricity came in 48. And they had been working for a long time putting the lines in. And finally the lines were all in and they were all hooked up. We were just waiting for the major flow of energy. and then the electricity was on and it was the first time. And that night as it got dark, I remember my father and my mother and my sister and one of my older brothers, we stood there and looked because suddenly it wasn't a black country anymore. We could see our neighbor's lights. Made it seem a lot less lonesome, a lot less isolated.

52:21Marion was a music teacher for many years before becoming a pioneer school teacher on the Ingalls Homestead. Every day she hangs out in the one-room schoolhouse, which looks exactly the way Laura describes her classroom at the Brewster School in her book These Happy Golden Years. Marion gives brief music and math lessons to the tourists and then has the class read a quote from Laura off the blackboard. The quote goes something like, It's best to be truthful and honest and make the best of what we have. Somehow it sounds revelatory.

52:58The prairie is the only place I've been to in my life where you can make the simplest, sweetest, even, I dare say, most cliched statement about the virtues of a simple life, and it sounds like anything but a cliché. It's as if the wind, which barrels through here like a wild animal, just knocks the irony out of everything. After a long day working at the Ingalls homestead, Joan Sullivan, Tim's wife, walks me down to the edge of the big slough. The grass is taller than we are, and it's easy to see how Mary and Laura could have gotten lost here. You know, there's still some honesty in the world, you know, and that's what Laura talked about.

53:34You know, it's good to be truthful and honest and to, you know, do what's right. And that's, I guess, what, you know, being here isn't always easy. It's a lot of hard work, and you wonder, you know, will the whole thing work out, you know, to be able to keep it running. But there's something about taking those morals and passing that on to a family. Do you think that has to do with farming, or do you think it's something about the time that Laura was living in, or a combination of those? Probably a combination of those. Trying to make an honest dollar. A farmer works hard. They feed the world.

54:18Why, hello. I'm glad so many of you have come to our little town on the prairie, Indy Smith. This is especially fine country, this prairie. At this time of the year, this is the hour that daylight softens and twilight falls. Oh, please forgive me. Sometimes I get a little carried away. The Laura Ingalls Wilder pageant runs for three weekends each summer. Admission is$5. About 700 people come each night. It's held right in the middle of the prairie, on land adjacent to the Ingalls homestead. From the pageant site, you can see the five cottonwood trees that Pa planted, one for each of my girls, he said, meaning Ma and his four daughters.

55:08The dialogue in the pageant has been prerecorded. When the pageant is actually performed, the cast members lip-sync the words and pantomime the action. This technique has its benefits and its perils. During the first performance this year, the actor playing Pa missed his cue, and his words came booming down onto the stage even though he wasn't there. The actors playing Mary and Laura and Ma carried on, talking to an invisible Pa like he was the voice of God. Pa, is it on Indian land, or land we'll have to move from? Not on Indian land, my pretty girl. This is surveyed land. Just wait for us to call it home.

55:47I want a place that's open, where I can run with the wind. Lots of room, Laura. It'll be the Ingalls Homestead. Doesn't that sound fine?

56:03I am completely charmed by this pageant. Yes, there are mistakes. Yes, you can hear places on the soundtrack where the tape has been edited. But all I can think as I watch these people on stage, many of them farmers, retired farmers, and the wives and kids of farmers, is how effectively they capture the feeling of the book. They're not selling anything. There's no agenda other than to celebrate Laura and the fact that she cared enough about this town to write these books about it.

56:34It's dusk on the prairie. Literally. That doesn't sound like something you'd say in earnest. It sounds like a lyric in some cowboy folk song, or a particularly bad line in a romance novel. But it's not. It is, simply, dusk on the prairie. Little girls in sweaters and pants from the Gap are wearing sunbonnets and standing on the benches to get a better look. Fathers with fussy babies stroll around the field so their wives can watch the pageant undisturbed. An eight-year-old girl in sneakers and jeans runs through the grass, the wind whipping through her hair, her sunbonnet flying out behind her.

57:17The pageant is a huge hit. When the show's over, the audience storms the stage to get the autographs of cast members. People are saying it's the best thing they've ever seen, that this trip to Dismet is the best vacation they've ever had. It's remarkable, really, that in a time when families can take vacations to Disney World or visit Great Adventure or even just stay home and watch TV, people will travel all the way to South Dakota to see a world that's described in a series of books. The Ingalls family managed to make homes for themselves in some of the most unforgiving conditions imaginable, in a cabin in the deep woods, in the banks of a creek, in a shanty surrounded by hundreds of flat, empty acres.

58:01But no matter where they lived, Pa played his fiddle, Ma did her sewing, and Laura managed to find delight in the world around her. Maybe that ability to merge the indoors and the outdoors, the familiar and the unfamiliar, is what all these people are responding to. Maybe that's why there's so much romance and the whole notion of a cabin stuck out in the middle of nowhere. People want to find comfort in an inherently uncomfortable place. They want to see if they can make it through the long winter and still see the beauty in the snow.

58:40Megan Daum. Two weeks after we first aired this story, Megan left New York City for Nebraska. She lived there for several years. She's since written a bunch of books, moved back and forth across the country a few more times, just like Laura Ingalls Wilder. You can find Megan's writing and a link to her podcast, her very interesting podcast, at meagandaum.com. By the way, these days, the actors in the pageant about Laura's life on the prairie actually speak their own lines themselves. Thanks to the advent of inexpensive wireless microphones, they no longer lip-sync to a pre-recorded track.

59:31Well, Berkamer is produced today by Julie Snyder and myself with Alex Bloomberg, Susan Burton, Blue Sheveny, and Nancy Updike. Contributing editors, Paul Tuff, Jack Hitt, Margie Rockland, Elise Spiegel, and Consuliere Sarah Vow. Production help from Todd Bachman, Starlee Kine, and Sylvia Lemus. Musical help from Marika Partridge and Terry Hecker. Help on today's rerun from Adrian Lilly, Molly Marcello, Stowe Nelson, and Ryan Rummery. Special thanks to Bob Carlson at KCRW and Larry Josephson at the Radio Foundation. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

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1:00:41That link is also in the show notes. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Tori Malatia, who wanders into our workspace, looking at all the new stuff we've bought, and asks... What, what do you... What? What's the price? I'm Eric Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. Oh, the joy. Tumble and bid my tired little sleepy head To a prairie lullaby De-o-de-ly, o-de-ly, o-de-ly, o-de-ly, o-de-ly, o-de-ly, o-de-ly, o-de-ly. This message comes from Mattress Firm. When your partner can't stay still, your sleep feels it too. Mattress Firm's sleep experts are trained to match you with the right mattress for how you actually sleep, like the Tempur-Pedic Adapt, designed to absorb motion so you can rest more deeply.

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