24 January 2004

Bedding Down at Big Pink

It is the heart of January here, cold as Hell, a small city in Michigan I used to pass through on occasion. I thought about that little town on Friday when the goose-bumps began to freeze on my skin. I was looking at the semi-trailer that came to Big Pink with the Murphy Bed. But I am getting ahead of myself. What I was considering was the folly of imagination and vision.

It is like the phrase I like to use about the budget process. "A vision without resources is a hallucination."

I had just used my scarce resources to buy myself an excellent hallucination. It is not that complex, if you bear with me for a minute. I don't know if this has happened to you. You might be a tougher and more dedicated shopper than I am. I happened to be in a Costco Warehouse when it happened to me the first time. I get quickly overwhelmed in those stores. It is true in all of the warehouse places, of course, the Home Depot, Bed Bath and Beyond and the Target mega-stores. The Walt-Mart. I like to say I don't go into the latter on principle, but it is really just be fear of that flying happy face.

I go into sensory overload at the sheer volume of things for sale. My hunter-gathering instincts collapse and I forget what it was I came in for in the first place. At the Costco that day I think we came for a block-party-size box of Party Poppers, breaded green peppers stuffed with cream cheese. I never saw them for sale at retail anywhere else. Having them on a platter gave our little soirees out in the County a note of bourgeois elegance, just like the fancy receptions downtown. So, having come in for an industrial-sized box of food products resulted in walking out with the peppers and a flat box that weighed more than my younger son.

The flat oblong container contained an armoire-in-a-box and had a pretty picture of a fully assembled and finished piece of furniture on the front. The ex thought it was perfect for my son's room. The ex never got confused in the hunting-and-gathering thing. But whether the price was right or not depends on your perspective. The box contained maybe three or four hundred parts and a thousand screws. It took a couple days to put together in a credible manner and I didn't ever stain it. After a while I wound up having fun doing it, imagining my self to be the Chinese worker laboring at 75 cents an hour to complete the job.

But the armoire only had to be lugged up the stairs from the family room where I put it together. It was not something I had to bolt it to the wall. Or the floor.

Friday I got a call to tell me that my Murphy Bed was inbound from the freight terminal. They had tried to deliver it once, couldn't do it, forgot one day, and now it was well and truly on the truck and coming down the highway from Manassass, all screw-ups resolved. I ducked home and met the semi in the parking lot. It was idling and the exhaust rose in clouds around the trailer like it was floating in clouds. It was clear and so cold that the wind had a density to it you could touch. The Weather Channel claimed it was sixteen degrees, but with a twenty mile-an-hour wind blowing it was way below zero.

Greg was the driver and he was dressed like an Eskimo: snow pants, heavy gloves, hooded sweatshirt over a down vest. He expected me to have a crew waiting for him. I didn't. Just me and my lady friend were there to greet him. When he opened the roller door on the trailer I looked on in amazement. I had been expecting three crates at a total of around 300 pounds. Something like the level of effort required to haul two drunken buddies out of a fraternity party to the car.

Awkward, but manageable.

What was in the back were three crates, invoiced at 865 pounds. One of the three was the mattress pad, weighing about five.

This was a horse of a different color indeed. This was the functional equivalent of moving two NFL Interior Linemen, with a Pee-wee Football team on their shoulders. The two long palettes with all the weight were sandwiched in plywood like gigantic sugar-wafers. Freezing ourselves numb, it was mostly Greg who dragged and skidded the awkward long pallets into the apartment. The second pallet was so heavy that we had to break the metal bands off it, discard the plywood and slide it to the hydraulic ramp. When we got it down in the parking lot and balanced on the two-wheeler I realized that it was not a linear package with internal integrity. Rather, it was stacks and stacks of genuine melamine parts all nested together, just like that Costco armoire, only eight feet long. Without the protective plywood wrapper, the pile began to bend and all those carefully fit pieces were threatening to go skittering across the black asphalt of the Big Pink Parking lot....

We eventually got it up the walkway past the pool and into the unit, and there we stacked it in ten or twelve piles around the one skid we had managed to get there intact. I gave Greg a twenty dollar bill for his personal inconvenience, and he went away and we surveyed the inert mass that was supposed to turn into a folding twin-bed and library unit hat would completely cover one of the end walls of the little apartment.

I tried to remember the vision. According to the web-site, two panels of the bookcase would glide smoothly on rollers to each side, exposing the mattress, which would lover gently down with the tug of one hand. The door had been open to the arctic blast and the little condo was almost as cold as it was outside. I was shivering, and it took hours for my feet and hands to warm up.

I began to sink into the second phase of home improvement projects, the depressing realization that I had just committed myself to fifty hours of 75 cent an hour labor.

Maybe this was going to work. It might even be fun!

You never can tell.