I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father.

James Thurber (1894–1961) often mined his Midwestern childhood in Columbus, Ohio, for comic material, especially the domestic mishaps and family lore that later became central to his autobiographical sketches. This line refers to one of those remembered household “set pieces,” told in the voice of an adult narrator looking back with mock-solemnity on what counted as a peak experience in youth. Thurber’s Columbus upbringing—marked by eccentric relatives, everyday middle-class routines, and his later partial blindness—fed a style in which small family incidents are elevated into legend through deadpan understatement and precise timing.

The humor comes from the grand phrasing (“high-water mark of my youth”) applied to an absurdly mundane catastrophe: a bed collapsing onto his father. Thurber turns childhood memory into comic mythology, suggesting that what stands out in youth is not heroic achievement but the startling, ridiculous moments that rupture ordinary life. The sentence also showcases his characteristic deadpan: the narrator “supposes” this is the pinnacle, as if weighing a serious life judgment, while the event itself is pure slapstick. Beneath the joke is a gentle portrait of family life, where embarrassment and accident become the stories that bind a household together.