Stuff

July 16

Stuff. Beautiful, glorious stuff. Two big wooden crates filled with our stuff arrived last week. Wenonoa and I are both known to favor minimalism when it comes to household stuff so you may be surprised over my excitement but consider…

For the last two months I have lived an existence that can be accurately described as Spartan. In the three bedroom house we are renting, the sole furnishings were a kitchen table and chairs; a pot, pan, a couple of plastic bowls and plates and assorted plastic cutlery; a yoga mat and exercise ball; and a mattress. I’m sure that there are monks who have more.

For the most part, I was ok with the setup. Except for the bed! It was a loaner until mine arrived. To call it a bed is being generous. Picture a set of springs wrapped inside a mattress casing – that is what I slept on. I’m not sure what happened to the foam or whatever material is generally used to fill a mattress these days but I’m pretty sure that if I cut open the mattress, I wouldn’t find any. If you think I’m exaggerating then consider this one fact: After Wenonoa spent her first night here, when she got up in the morning I noticed a series of indentations running up her back where the springs pressed into her flesh.

The worst part about the bed was that I could have had a nice (or at least decent) one. The standard contract used by the FSM government when hiring ex-pats requires the government to supply a bed and a kitchen table. I could have gone down to Ace Hardware (yes, Ace Hardware) or one of the few other stores that sells mattresses and walked out with a brand new mattress. Given that even a basic twin mattress retails for over $400 here and I generally hate to see money wasted, no matter whose it is, I didn’t.

I thought, “How bad could it be? My bed from home will arrive in a month or so.” So I took the loner and I found out just how bad it could be. For over 60 nights I tried to shrink my body into the narrowest of spaces between the columns of springs. It never worked and I don’t think I got one good night’s sleep in the two month period.

So yes – stuff, glorious stuff! Each time I walk into the bedroom and see our bed lying there, soft but firm with no springs poking up at me, waves of relief and appreciation wash over me.

Second in the list of possessions I truly cherish having is our television set. It’s nothing fancy. It’s a modest 27” or 32” and it’s not a flat screen. Having watched movies on a laptop at the kitchen table for two months, watching a movie on a 27” television screen while sitting in a good old Lazy Boy recliner is now as exciting as the first time I heard surround sound or sat in a theater with stadium seating.

As Huck Finn might have said, “I feel a might bit civilized.”