Blog's First Day--the Crib Hunt

The first day of this blog, which chronicles our child's early life and his parents' efforts to make his life a good one--look for the book out in 2014--finds us two days before Halloween. I will try to splice humor and insight with the minutia and monotony of a way, traversed by many of you, my readers, and avoided by many others. I can only hope to entertain.

We spent the day, much as yesterday, hunting for baby furniture. Though yesterday found us overwhelmed with the variety of choices and prices as to every aspect of baby care and entertainment, we went to Baby's R Us, today finds us underwhelmed with our choice to seek out a cheap crib. See, we drove twenty miles hunting a crib advertised in San Antonio Current, the same rag that you can find your same sex life mate, if you so desire. We called about the excellent condition item and set up an early 10 am appointment. I predicted, correctly, that we would find an old man. Why? because he made us visit early and could not provide an emailed copy of the crib and changing table. I trucked my wife over to this mapquest in hand. As we pulled up, Kelly exclaimed, "Back up and leave." She thought better and we decided to stay, though we had already decided, not to buy the delipidated item, so coyly called "excellent." From his garage emerged the old man I had previously predicted. A veteran perhaps still used to the bugle call, friendly, shaving a boogie board to smoothness in his homemade laboratory, he met us flipping his head to the crib leaning, in its constituent pieces, against the garage door, as if in the twelve hours since our call, he had blown off cob webs, accounted for most of it and placed it there so that when we drove up, we might make an immediate positive choice. He did not know Kelly. But I did. "So you'll take it," hoping to catch us off guard he said. Kelly explained that we were looking for a crib but wanted to make sure that all the pieces fit, not true, we wanted a way out. He nicely began to assemble the crib, enlisting me, like a sergeant to his troop. I could see how the parts were fitting and he did not listen to me when I said that certain parts fit in a certain order. He came to the conclusion that the crib was broken, "But you can screw this part together easily." At last our way out, Kelly said slyly, "Oh but we're not handy." Internally I protested, I am so handy, but I never wanted to come in the first place, I wanted to go and to move on to our post-crib-visit plan tacos, coffee and a newspaper. "Yeah, I guess you don't want a broken crib; sorry for making you all drive out, " he said scratching his bald head, perplexed. I felt a little sorry because I knew it could be assembled, but between my wife who would never purchase such a rickety scratched-uppity crib and this old man who had made me get up too early for sunday, could not work a digital camera or the internet, and would not listen to save his sale, I was not going to feel too sorry and again could smell the tacos. "OK bye." "Bye." He would later call, telling us that it wasn't broken, but we didn't return the call.

Please continue to read these next days as my posts can only get funnier.