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Impetuous! Homeric!
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derspatchel and I both received a healthy exposure to James Thurber while growing up, we have determined that last night shall henceforth be known as the night the bed fell on our kittens.
Because the kittens are fine. They were not even in the same room, having been assiduously lured out with feather toy and judicious profanity. The bed, however, is pretty broke.
The thing to understand about our former bed is that it is a hand-me-down from my parents; my grandparents had it before them. I don't even know the name for it: it's a kind of storage bed with slats that basically consists of a queen-sized open rectangle of wood, a central partition running head to foot, and slats arranged in a kind of rope ladder, so that they rest on the partition and a niche on either inside of the frame. Mattress goes on top. If you want access to the storage space, you lift off the mattress and roll the slats back. We weren't using the storage space, but the kittens had discovered they could slip in under the tiny headboard and roam around in the partitioned space, mewing plaintively when they couldn't remember how to get out. (Consonant with the laws of humor, it turned out that a kitten could get out just fine once we weren't trying to help them, but the laws of humor do not apply when the kitten panics and begins scrabbling frantically at the inside of the bed, necessitating intervention from the people who were trying to sleep on top of it.) The kittens were being especially inconvenient last night. First one and then the other slipped inside the bed and refused to leave, despite repeated clawing at the slats. I tried to read, assuming they'd extricate themselves. They didn't, not both the same time. Finally Rob took up the cat magnet—a jingly toy trailing now grievously battered peacock feathers, proud artifacts of our young predators' growing skills—and whisked them both out of the room, closing the door behind him.
He sat down on the bed. Something gave under me. We leapt off the bed and discovered the slats had slipped partly off the left-hand inside niche, tilting the mattress slightly. Distressing, because we hadn't known it could do that, but not a disaster: we slid them back into place, making sure they were braced correctly on both sides. I got back into bed. I was very tired. I've slept between one and five hours a night for over a month now, recently tending toward two or three; it's the worst trouble I've had sleeping since 2006 or 2007. Earlier in the day we'd bought an air conditioner; I was looking forward to installing it in the bedroom window so that the heat collecting under the eaves would no longer be a factor in the insomnia. I was reading a tiny critical study of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill (1965) which I was quite enjoying. Rob collected his book and got into bed.
The bed collapsed. Galvanically, like a sort of weltering whale. I can write that in hindsight because no one was hurt and the sudden subsidence of mattress and bedclothes underneath a pair of startled people must have looked hilarious from the outside, like something that could happen to Buster Keaton at the end of a long day. It was three-thirty in the morning, we were both stressed and exhausted; it felt horribly emblematic of everything that has been difficult about this spring. It was the one last thing we didn't have the strength to deal with.
So we dealt with it, because the alternative was not an option. Parts of the frame had splintered. The partition had snapped completely. There were wrenched nails sticking out of the slats. We dragged the mattress off the frame, shoved the frame off into a corner, this was also the point at which we discovered that one of the kittens had conscientiously peed while under the bed, so we cleaned that up, dropped the mattress back onto the floor from which we had so recently rescued it, and it was four-something in the morning by then. I'm not even sure what time it was by the time I finally fell asleep. There was bright hot light outside the curtains and at least I had a bigger fan on the dresser than the tiny little desktop thing that whirred through my nights on Dartmouth Street last summer. It's not that hot this afternoon. It might even be breezy by now. The kittens—undamaged, importunate, adorable—keep trying to climb on my lap and interfere with my typing. I had nightmares I can't remember. We need a new bed.
And that was the night the bed fell on our kittens.
derspatchel and I both received a healthy exposure to James Thurber while growing up, we have determined that last night shall henceforth be known as the night the bed fell on our kittens.Because the kittens are fine. They were not even in the same room, having been assiduously lured out with feather toy and judicious profanity. The bed, however, is pretty broke.
The thing to understand about our former bed is that it is a hand-me-down from my parents; my grandparents had it before them. I don't even know the name for it: it's a kind of storage bed with slats that basically consists of a queen-sized open rectangle of wood, a central partition running head to foot, and slats arranged in a kind of rope ladder, so that they rest on the partition and a niche on either inside of the frame. Mattress goes on top. If you want access to the storage space, you lift off the mattress and roll the slats back. We weren't using the storage space, but the kittens had discovered they could slip in under the tiny headboard and roam around in the partitioned space, mewing plaintively when they couldn't remember how to get out. (Consonant with the laws of humor, it turned out that a kitten could get out just fine once we weren't trying to help them, but the laws of humor do not apply when the kitten panics and begins scrabbling frantically at the inside of the bed, necessitating intervention from the people who were trying to sleep on top of it.) The kittens were being especially inconvenient last night. First one and then the other slipped inside the bed and refused to leave, despite repeated clawing at the slats. I tried to read, assuming they'd extricate themselves. They didn't, not both the same time. Finally Rob took up the cat magnet—a jingly toy trailing now grievously battered peacock feathers, proud artifacts of our young predators' growing skills—and whisked them both out of the room, closing the door behind him.
He sat down on the bed. Something gave under me. We leapt off the bed and discovered the slats had slipped partly off the left-hand inside niche, tilting the mattress slightly. Distressing, because we hadn't known it could do that, but not a disaster: we slid them back into place, making sure they were braced correctly on both sides. I got back into bed. I was very tired. I've slept between one and five hours a night for over a month now, recently tending toward two or three; it's the worst trouble I've had sleeping since 2006 or 2007. Earlier in the day we'd bought an air conditioner; I was looking forward to installing it in the bedroom window so that the heat collecting under the eaves would no longer be a factor in the insomnia. I was reading a tiny critical study of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill (1965) which I was quite enjoying. Rob collected his book and got into bed.
The bed collapsed. Galvanically, like a sort of weltering whale. I can write that in hindsight because no one was hurt and the sudden subsidence of mattress and bedclothes underneath a pair of startled people must have looked hilarious from the outside, like something that could happen to Buster Keaton at the end of a long day. It was three-thirty in the morning, we were both stressed and exhausted; it felt horribly emblematic of everything that has been difficult about this spring. It was the one last thing we didn't have the strength to deal with.
So we dealt with it, because the alternative was not an option. Parts of the frame had splintered. The partition had snapped completely. There were wrenched nails sticking out of the slats. We dragged the mattress off the frame, shoved the frame off into a corner, this was also the point at which we discovered that one of the kittens had conscientiously peed while under the bed, so we cleaned that up, dropped the mattress back onto the floor from which we had so recently rescued it, and it was four-something in the morning by then. I'm not even sure what time it was by the time I finally fell asleep. There was bright hot light outside the curtains and at least I had a bigger fan on the dresser than the tiny little desktop thing that whirred through my nights on Dartmouth Street last summer. It's not that hot this afternoon. It might even be breezy by now. The kittens—undamaged, importunate, adorable—keep trying to climb on my lap and interfere with my typing. I had nightmares I can't remember. We need a new bed.
And that was the night the bed fell on our kittens.
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We are, too! Things could have gone much worse.
(Lack of sleep, continued, counts as somewhat injured, at least to this fellow of pain --> insufficient sleep.)
"It's a vicious cycle!"
(No, seriously: I sleep less well from being in pain and sleeping less causes my normally high pain thresholds to drop. I remember this from 2006. It sucked.)
We had an Ikea bed like that at our old place, doubtless less durable than the one you've inherited but similarly constructed.
It's some kind of Danish modern; it actually says "Made in Denmark" on the underside of one slat. My mother thinks it could be fifty years old. Her parents are the same people who left us the exact same model of Eames chair that is now in the MFA.
(Ours is in my parents' basement. It's incredibly uncomfortable and I want to take it with me someday.)
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That Eames chair is lovely and rather vicious-looking at the same time.
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(Anonymous) 2014-06-11 06:47 am (UTC)(link)Yay for Thurber! I'm glad somebody else in my generation grew up with his works.
He and I seem to have this strange geographical affinity. We were born in the same city, and in the Thirties he bought a house in the town where I live now.
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I envision the HMS Harold Bloom.
I'm sorry for all of this--the trauma, the heat, the exhaustion, the loss of a much-wanted bed--but, damn, this was funny. Fentiman's Lemonade.
*hugs* if it weren't so hot.
Nine
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Kittens often reveal unrealized cracks in one's apparently stable circumstances. We had a long-forgotten bag of compact fluorescent bulbs tucked so tidily away on a shelf in the back hall that we had all forgotten about it. David had once tried to take them to the hazardous waste disposal site, riding for this purpose with a friend who had a lot of bulbs as well, and they weren't allowed to get rid of the bulbs there because the bulbs came from two different addresses and were now tidily and irretrievably mixed up. This made the bag a very sore point, and even though more avenues later opened up for recycling such bulbs, we just forgot.
Ninja and Nuit found the bag one rainy afternoon when Lydy was asleep and David and I were absent and Raphael was upstairs working. The EPA is very specific about how to clean up after such a discovery. We now keep the bulbs in the cat-free zone -- a luxury we had never had until we had a household of four people in a duplex -- and I have even taken some of them to the hardware store and paid to have them removed from our lives.
I don't feel that having an old bed is really at all the same kind of thing, and wish your discovery could have been gentler.
P.
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Yeah. The kittens are not replaceable.
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Pretty good angle, all told. Once the hysterics were over.
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We were just trying to go to sleep! It felt very unfair.
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That is, unfortunately, the failure mode of that sort of bed, although apparently if one did not buy it at IKEA just out of college they can last generations instead of only years. However, cats just seem to be able to destroy them. When Ishtar took out B's, we piled stuff under it until we could leave the mattress on what had been the frame, because there wasn't room to put the mattress flat anywhere else in the space... she did it the exact same way the kittens did, by getting underneath and heaving the slats upward unevenly, and this upset the delicate balance of tensions and then everything cracked. I thought it was a just-out-of-college-IKEA-furniture problem or I'd have mentioned.
And of course they get Terribly Trapped under there, too. Ah well. I am glad everyone is uninjured.
Love.
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My father believes he can patch the frame sufficiently that we don't have to run out and buy a new bed tonight, although we shouldn't then decide it's no big deal, we can wait a month. Toward this end he came over earlier this evening, tried to cannibalize some of the outer frame to rebuild the partition, and then went back to the house for more tools and/or wood. [edit] And just came back with power tools and wood. Since I don't think it's possible for us to buy a new bed tonight, I'm hoping he's right.
My mother thinks it didn't fall apart years earlier because there were enough boxes stored underneath the mattress that they took the weight instead of the partition and no one ever thought to check how the stress was actually being distributed. Plus no one in Lexington had cats.
I am glad everyone is uninjured.
Agreed.
Love you so.
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Actually, now that I think about it, we rebuilt at least two.
They were trundles, one (or more, I don't remember) from IKEA which would have been about a year old and one a bed I had when I was a kid (it cracked when we lived in Cambridge.) The trundle clearly didn't do much to support the slats (which is good because otherwise you'd never be able to draw it out and use it) but it did mean we only fell a couple of inches instead of all the way to the floor and this may have been what saved the frame from worse damage. One of the times involved wrestling, which I only remember because I would tell people this and they'd all go "wrestling, huh, wink wink nudge nudge" and, yes, wrestling. The other time people were just sitting on the bed quietly watching TV. Thrud complained because she said beds should be designed for two people to be doing something somewhat athletic on them. Possibly despite the evidence of college students in dorm rooms, no one expects people to be doing anything athletic on a twin.
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Thank you!
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Alternately, what size mattress do you have? My parents are attempting to divest of a magnificent king bedroom set (dark, solid wood) come mid-July because it doesn't match their upcoming decor.
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It got better once my parents started relating anecdotes of beds they have broken. My mother remembered one time they were staying over—she thought at her parents'—when they had to try not to let anyone know until morning. The waterbed with tiny cat-claw-sized punctures was also a favorite.
Alternately, what size mattress do you have? My parents are attempting to divest of a magnificent king bedroom set (dark, solid wood) come mid-July because it doesn't match their upcoming decor.
Alas, our mattress is queen-sized. Thank you for thinking of us!
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Yay for Thurber! I'm glad somebody else in my generation grew up with his works.
He and I seem to have this strange geographical affinity. We were born in the same city, and in the Thirties he bought a house in the town where I live now.