Highlights and Disappointments

This past weekend relatives of my husband were supposed to pick up a Hoosier cabinet that had belonged to Don’s parents and that we had restored back to its original glory a few years back. I was giving it to them, just to keep it in the family. It took me two days to unload, sort and pack up all the pressed glass I kept inside. She was thrilled about the idea and had since last August to discuss the decision to take the piece with her husband. She knew just where in the house she was going to put it and less than a week ago she was excited about the idea of searching eBay to complete the original canister set that came with the cabinet when it was new back in 1920s. You can guess what’s coming, can’t you. Saturday I got a call. The husband doesn’t want cabinet, refuses to pick it up and talk about an awkward conversation that one sure was! She felt bad. I was in shock. She suggested she could call around to see if she could “find someone else to take it” and although her saying that shouldn’t have ticked me off, it did. Big time. If I’m going to give away something that I could easily sell for upwards of $700 I’ll be the one to decide who to give it to, thank you very much. No one needs to do me a favor to “take it off my hands” when the auction house’s pickup service is just a phone call away. Thankfully I didn’t say that but the words were itching to roll off my tongue.

After hanging up the phone, I tried moving the Hoosier out to the garage but even though it’s on casters it wouldn’t budge. I walked around the house looking for another place to put the restored ice box when it comes back from the refinisher after Christmas---it was earmarked to replace the Hoosier in my dining area---and I found a place on my sun porch that just requires me to move a small chest of drawers. I spent the rest of the day unpacking my pressed glass and putting it back in the Hoosier. That cabinet can damn well sit where it’s at until and if I have an actually moving date. Between this experience and the bed that took months to pick up, I'm threw with the drama of giving things away! Well, that’s not true. I have some pieces in my basement promised to someone on my side of the family. And Wednesday I’m delivering a mantel clock to my brother-in-law. At least he and his wife discussed the acquisition and are in agreement. I know they did because I was there to witness it. Isn’t it fascinating when the internal power structure of a marriage is revealed like it was with the Hoosier cabinet fiasco? How could a woman know for three months that she wanted to take a piece of furniture and not talk it over with her husband until the pickup was supposed to take place? Or maybe she did talk about it, he listened without saying anything and she took his silence as agreement. Women and men do that. 

On to the highlights. Last night I went to the Mannheim Steamroller Christmas show, a live concert billed as having “dazzling multimedia effects.” I had no idea who or what the Mannheim Steamroller is, but I signed up for the show through the senior hall, hopped on their bus and let the multimedia effects dazzle me for a few hours. And I was dazzled. It was only the second off Broadway show that I’ve ever attended so I’m still wowed with the techno lighting at the performance center---how its colored images flows off the stage and drifts across the fifty ceiling screens above and how the side walls of center changes colors turning the people sitting in the boxes into silhouettes and how the colored lights from the stage flicker across the entire audience, turning us into part of the show. On the huge screen behind the Mannheim Steamroller performers, was an eclectic collection of images going nonstop and most of the time they didn’t seem to connect to the music, so your mind was always challenged to figure out, for example, why ruins in Greece where paired with whales swimming. (Duh, I think I just got it! They probably whale watch off the coast of Greece.) A lot of famous artwork was on the big screen, too. One whole song was taken up with works of Leonard da Vinci’s work. Twenty-seven songs in all were performed, about a third of them Christmas music. It was a good show and, yes, it was worth the $66 for the ticket and bus ride. The senior hall sponsors three or four off Broadway shows a year and they are popular. We had eighty of us in our group. And the more I think about moving away from this townships’ senior hall, the less certain I become about the idea.

It’s good I had the Mannheim Steamroller performance to see so close on the heels of the Hoosier cabinet fiasco because without it to offset that drama I could have got sucked down into a funk. Downsizing is hard enough as it is. The morning after the show I got a Facebook message from the relative asking if I found anyone to take the cabinet. “Yes,” I replied. “Me. And when I no longer have room for it, it will go to the auction house.” I ended the message with a joke about getting my glassware thinned down and washed so she’d know there’s no hard feelings even though, just between you and me, that’s not 100% true…but give me a week or so and it will be. As soon as my back quits hurting from moving around heavy boxes of pressed glass then I'll be able to forget the whole thing happened. ©