new old more book profile blog rings host

prev the road not taken next
1999-12-22 | 11:16:05

Someday, I will look back on this time and say, "We used to have a squeaky bed." But right now, I just have a squeaky bed. I can't tell you how much it irritates me. It can take me 20 minutes, 30 minutes, even an hour to nurse the baby to sleep, and as soon as I move a muscle the bed betrays me and does its damnedest to wake him up. Often, it succeeds. It's a very loud bed. It also gives me terrible backaches; aches and pains of all kinds, really. I think to myself, Why did you buy this awful bed without so much as sitting on it? What kind of an IDIOT are you? We bought it right in the middle of our last move, and we had a rented minivan that needed to be returned, and I spent all my time in the store worrying about whether the bed would fit in the van instead of trying out the display model. We bought it at a warehouse club, at 8 o'clock at night, not at one of those mattress stores where the pushy sales clerks encourage you to roll around on their plushtops. We had to return the van the next day, so we felt we didn't have another choice. I suppose if we'd bought it at a mattress store, they could have delivered it, but we didn't think of that. But the bed cost less than $300 at the warehouse club; much more at the mattress stores.

Older people, storytellers, have a way of making the past sound charming and delightful. They can describe almost anything and make it sound rich and noble and vaguely Irish.

In those days, we lived in a little studio apartment. It was a seventh-floor walkup. The bathtub was right in the middle of the kitchen! And my first husband was always late for work, so every morning, I could hear him running down those stairs.

Maybe that will be me, someday, talking about the road not taken. But at this moment, I'm stuck in the here and now. I hope I never become the sort of person who automatically whitewashes every event in her past and replays it through a gauzy filter. Those people are well-intentioned but untrustworthy.

prev archive next
0 comments

if you're not reading mawm you're not reading me
random