Humbled

Saturday I bought a new television, a 52″ flat panel LED TV. I had a funny idea for a blog post floating around in my head about I let people down by not buying a 55″ or 60″ model, but it never really came together. Then again, sometimes the best entries write themselves.

Sunday afternoon I fell asleep in my recliner while watching my brand new television. Although things were peaceful when I fell asleep, I awoke to the unmistakable clanging of metal on metal. A groggy and cranky investigation revealed Susan was disassembling Mason’s bunk beds. I grew up with bunk beds in my room, so a few years ago when it was time to buy Mason a “big boy bed” I suggested bunk beds for him too. Four years later, he wants something else. I’m okay with that.

Anyone who knows Susan knows she is all about action. One can barely mention a chore without having her zip out of the room to begin it. Me? I’ve mastered the art of procrastination and moved on to nocrastination — as in, “I’ll get to it, never.” (Yes, I just made up “nocrastination”.) But not Susan. No sooner did she learn that an acquaintance of hers could use the bunk beds than off she ran, Allen wrench in hand, to begin disassembling the bunk beds and give them away.

“The mattresses too?” I asked. “Yes, the mattresses too.” While helping Susan separate the top bunk from the bottom, I ran the numbers through my head. With mattresses, I think the bed cost us around $400. That’s $100 per year. Not a great investment.

Already irritated, I really started getting frustrated when trying to move the beds through the doorway and out into the front yard. Moving furniture with Susan — or as I like to call it, “watch how little Susan understands the basics of physics” — is always an adventure. It’s entertaining to watch just how little she understands about how three dimensional objects work. Moving furniture with her isn’t just frustrating, it’s downright baffling. At one point I got the impression she thought the door jamb was going to magically grow if she kept bashing it with the bed.

Once outside I learned that not only were we donating the beds, but we were delivering them as well. This also involved getting gas, because we were delivering them 30 miles away. Did I mention the people we were delivering it to assured us that there was no way there address would be on any modern GPS? And it wasn’t until after we had pulled out of the neighborhood that I learned Susan didn’t have the exact address yet, but would hopefully get it before we got there … as long as someone there answered the phone, which they currently weren’t doing. At this point I began looking around for the Candid Camera/Punked camera crew (same joke — two generations, pick either).

So we drove and we drove. We took the turnpike to an interstate, the interstate to a town, the town to some back roads, the back roads to a gravel road, and the gravel road to a dirt road that barely even qualified as a road. From recent rains, deep trenches had formed in and across the road. At least once, my Avalanche bottomed out; neither of our other two cars would have had a prayer in making it down that ravine.

At the end of the road we found Susan’s friend’s house — a little mobile home set up on a big chunk of land. Scattered around the property were half a dozen cars, at least two school buses, and several animals. Morgan counted two dogs, three cats, one rabbit, and about a dozen roosters and chickens.

Susan’s friends have four kids, I think — eight year old twins (one boy, one girl), an eleven year old son, and a sixteen year old daughter. Throughout the evening’s conversation I learned that at least two of the kids — the two boys, I think — sleep on the floor. Every night. They’ve been looking for some bunk beds because they don’t have room for two more beds in the house.

Susan’s friend is bilingual but her husband speaks only Spanish, so my conversations with him were either translated by his wife, or presented through an embarrassingly bad game of charades. Before we left though, the man shook my hand, looked me in the eye, and said “gracias.”

We were only there for about fifteen minutes or so, during which our kids and their kids had chased down a rabbit, fed some chickens, played with the dogs and jumped on a trampoline. After sustaining a minor trampoline injury Morgan was ready to get in the car, but we had to literally drag Mason away from an impromptu soccer game that the boys had started. Even before we had made it back to the gravel road, the kids were asking when they could go back and play some more.

Although I feel good about the bed situation, it kind of killed my “new TV” buzz. Maybe tomorrow.