The Room That Never Was

Because the basement of my childhood home was unfinished, my parents came up with a plan based on a series of DIY projects for my father in his spare time. He made a diagram of what the finished product would look like by dividing the basement into quadrants, mapping out the details in terms of priorities. The laundry room and dark room (my dad’s hobby was photography) would be built first; then the second bedroom; next a workroom for my dad (to be shared with the furnace) and a general play area for us kids; and finally, the rec room and a walk-in pantry (for my mother’s preserves).

It turned out that my dad didn’t have a lot of spare time. But gradually, over the course of three years, the dark room, laundry room and my sister’s new bedroom (at last! a room of my own) was rendered fully functional. The project was progressing slowly, but on still on track, until plans for the rec room underwent a sea change.

I have no idea where they found them, but one Saturday, my parents brought home eight larger-than-life cutouts displaying an Arabian Nights theme. Three of the posters depicted fanciful interpretations of domed buildings with minarets and the other five showed characters from the collected fairy tales, including a brightly clad dancing girl, Ali Baba standing in a cave of glittering jewels and a kissing couple on a flying carpet.

My mom had this great idea—part of the rec room would be transformed into a fairy tale version of the exotic Middle East. The cutouts would be used to create a partition between the TV room and the party room; some of them would also decorate the walls in lieu of pictures. A home bar would be added, and in keeping with the posters, the decor would include large, colorful floor cushions, a low, curvy chaise lounge in a very bright shade and sections of gauzy, veil-like curtains to add ambiance. My mother had outlined this whimsical party room in such detail that she made me envision it too.

I could hardly wait! Forget the adults—it would be a great place to hang out with friends and have birthday parties. Finally, the basement was completed, including the rec room. My mother had arranged the space so that the home bar could still be added at a later date when time allowed. The rec room was great—I hung out with friends, watched TV with my sister and did homework at the communal desk.

But the magical, whimsical, fanciful exotic Middle East-themed party room never materialized. For awhile, the cardboard cutouts informally decorated the basement (translation, they were leaned against the walls and moved from place to place whenever they got in our way). Eventually, the colors faded, a couple of them simply disintegrated and were discarded, and the rest were dismantled and stored out of sight. Upstairs, just off the dining room, a large wood tea cart did double duty as a wine/drinks cart.

A very quick, very informal and very unscientific poll of unsuspecting volunteers in the Cymax lunch room and fax machine area revealed that a fair number of my co-workers do not store their wine and/or spirits in a piece of furniture specifically designed for that purpose. The kitchen cupboard was the hands-down winner at 21. The second most popular place to store any type of alcohol, at 10 votes, was the fridge. Five stated that they would bring a bottle of something home for a special occasion, but they didn’t make a habit of keeping any on hand. One person admitted to hiding a bottle of booze in his sock drawer—but I’m pretty sure he was joking.

Only 11of my co-workers polled for their opinion had some form of wine furniture in their homes. At 7 votes, the hands-down winner of that part of the survey was the all-purpose wine rack. (One person confessed to using said wine rack for “bubbly, fizzy, fruity non-alcoholic drinks,” to which I replied that it still counted.) Of the remaining 4, one owned a wine cooler and the other 3 had liquor cabinets.

I didn’t include myself in the above (very informal unscientific) survey, but I am the proud owner of a nine-bottle wine rack (in a warm wood finish). My Christmas cheer is stored in, you guessed it, the kitchen cupboard farthest from the stove. I enjoy entertaining, and in the last two years, the frequency I have friends over for meals appears to be increasing. More and more, I find myself using my buffet as a home bar, but I have to be careful, since the hutch won’t allow the placement of taller bottles or my really cute ice bucket.

I’ll have to give it some thought. For all those future holidays and the many opportunities life in general brings for celebrating with food, wine and friends, I really would like a more formal place to entertain. Since living in an apartment totally negates any possibility of recreating my mother’s exotic Middle East-themed party room, an elegant liquor cabinet (with hidden casters) or a wine server with a built-in glass rack might be the perfect solution.

Beasts of Burden and the Beauty of Futile Resistance

At the turn of the turn of the twentieth century, horses the world over celebrated the advent of widespread application of the internal combustion engine. From whinnying to neighing to trotting about (kind of at a loss as to how horses celebrate here), the perennial beasts of burden were thrilled at the promise of no longer being forced to pull every ridiculous contraption those strange bipeds had come up with over the centuries. It’s easy to understand they were ecstatic at the promise of slowly becoming obsolete.

Still, there must have been the odd individual who preferred the carriage and his trusty equine friend, but for most the appeal of not sitting directly behind an animal that consumes a large quantity of fibrous food everyday (Rusty …. RUSTY!) and the sexiness of those new motorcars sent many a horse out to pasture – happily.

Here’s the thing – I may be a chronically frustrated and disillusioned musician, but I’m a musician nonetheless. Despite the rock n’ roll lifestyle dream slowly withering away, I still hold out a faint hope of one day receiving my first royalty. To that end, and more so because I simply love the tangibility of them, I’m one of the dying breed who still buy CDs. Napster be damned, I believe musicians should receive their due compensation and conversely I’m quite proud of my beyond-expansive CD collection. Though it appears inevitable that they are doomed to have the same legacy to music as the horse does for transport, I will be the aforementioned guy in the horse-drawn carriage staring disdainfully at the Model-T.

My CD collection? I’d say 600 plus qualifies as beyond expansive and it grows in small increments once or twice a month. Much to the aesthetic displeasure of my wife, it takes up a good portion of the wall space in our living room by being stored in all manner of racking; from six foot wooden towers to bare function plastic trays to the discs that are parked on the floor in the overflow lot. I’ll admit it’s a bit of an eyesore, but it’s part of me and, plain and simple, a CD collection speaks big-time cool.

I may, however, cave in to the better half’s décor wishes. I’m thinking a CD / DVD spinning tower or spinning media tower may be a more stylish and functional storage solution for my archaic medium and Cymax Stores Online features a large selection of entertainment library storage options at competitive prices. A standard CD tower or media tower and their against-wall orientation may be more suitable considering our space constraints. Either way, whichever media storage cabinet or CD storage rack I buy will need to be a large one as for as long as they keep making them I will keep buying them.

I’m sure those same horses are sympathizing with the millions of over-worked pistons and valves around the world holding out hope for the advent of perpetual motion. My wish for the devolution of the commercial music industry is about as likely.

Technicolor Memories and the Living Rainbow

My childhood home was a dream for anyone ten years old or younger. My parents built the home in a tiny, dusty town a three hour’s drive from the nearest large city. We had a diner, a grocery store, and two service stations – across the road from each other – and not much else. I hadn’t experienced fast food or shopping malls until we moved and I was nearly a teenager; perfect timing, don’t you think?

My parents built the house specifically with my brother and I in mind – if we were kept entertained, we’d be out of their way. The playroom in the basement was carpeted with multicolored squares to create a patchwork rainbow. There was a “hidden” room under the stairs that became our secret lair. The walls, with a stark white base, were encouraged to be made our own; several masterpieces and brilliant prose have surely long since been painted over. The best part of the house, however, was the backyard.

Painstakingly each spring, my mom and dad would plant the gardens. All around the perimeter were beautiful blooming flowers, teeming with ladybugs and dragonflies. Two apple trees sat in the middle, perfectly executed as a “home base” when playing tag, or makeshift goal posts. Raspberries, strawberries and rhubarb stained the corners red – along with every child’s face on our block. Near the back was a vegetable garden that produced every color of the rainbow: tomatoes, pumpkins, beans, peas, cabbage, carrots, onions, cucumbers, corn, and potatoes. It was all we ate in the summer and likely why I have such an aversion to frozen vegetables now. Once you’ve pulled a carrot and rinsed off the dirt with the garden hose, you can never settle for something shrink wrapped.

The inaugural gardening day usually took place in late April. Dad begrudgingly pulled down his cap and set to work – his job was the worst; he was in charge of bug and leaf removal. Mom brought out all her baby plants and flowers and dug new homes for them in the freshly fertilized soil. I watched from the sidelines, wondering how dead grass and gray dirt would ever become the garden I was accustomed to.

Before I knew it, the backyard was alive again and with the sun came the anticipation of apple pies and carrot cake to eat and bumblebees and butterflies to catch. I remember stuffing unlucky bugs into old yogurt cups to keep as pets, only to have my brother set them free in the evening. And my parents, sitting on their garden swing, illuminated by the watchful eye of the outdoor porch light, taking it all in, enjoying the fruits of their labor, sometimes literally.

As summer rounds the corner and dusk brings the scents of barbeque and the sounds of tag, I wonder if the people who moved into our old house twenty years ago maintained the backyard as my parents did. I wonder if they had children to play amongst the greens and yellows and reds as we had. And I wonder if I could still catch a butterfly.

Disposing Childhood Baggage

I am one of the most frugal people you’ll ever meet. I think part of it is a result of having to count pennies to buy milk each week when I was a kid. Part of it is in my genes though, too. For decades, my mother wore these terribly ugly, big, round Sally Jesse Raphael glasses with tacky red plastic frames. All three of us kids took turns trying to throw them away – I even stuffed them at the very bottom of the garbage can on my day to take out the trash – but low and behold, my mother found them and fished them right back out, and we were stuck with what we, at that time, thought was the most embarrassing, unfashionable mother in the world.

My father is the same. He had a plain white T-shirt from the 70s, which he wore well into the 90s, where it transgressed into an unbecoming grey, complete with oil spills and sweat stains. For years we tried to get him to chuck the thing out, but he kept saying that it was a perfectly good shirt, so why throw it away? On a momentous day, my father was hiking through the woods and got this shirt caught on a blackberry bush. With the T-shirt ripped up the side, all three of us kids felt blessed. But my father was a reduce-reuse-recycle kind of guy, well before the green wave came around, so the T-shirt was turned into a dog collar for about four years, then an oil rag for the old car he was restoring. I was over at my parents’ house a few weeks ago; my mother asked me to grab some cola from the garage, and there was the T-shirt turned cloth, in all its black, filthy glory. To my disgust, my mother still has those horrible glasses, but promises that she only uses them when she can’t find her regular reading ones (which I have a feeling is more often than I want to imagine).

Needless to say, although I don’t have ugly glasses, nor shirts that have lasted more than fifteen years (although I must admit, I DO have a few that have hit the ten year mark), I inherited the frugality gene, which at times is a blessing, but other times a bit annoying, especially when my partner wants to splurge on a trip to Vegas.

I’ve never been to Sin City, and didn’t think I ever wanted to go. I picture the city of Vegas to be one massive slot machine that opens up and sucks money right out of your pockets. To me, gambling seems like the most imprudent thing a person could do, but we need a weekend away, the flights were cheap (even I agreed with that) and my partner promises me that we will do other things than sit and gamble all day.

The temperature in Vegas during the month of June can get up past 100ºF, so we’re not planning on packing much at all. Bathing suits, a couple of pairs of shorts, shirts, and a light sweater for when we are inside with the air conditioning; maybe a nice outfit when we go out for my partner’s birthday dinner, but other than that, there really isn’t much to bring.

Nevertheless, we need new luggage. I have never owned a new suitcase or travel bag; I have always relied on hand-me-downs, but in my family, the chance of obtaining hand-me-downs doesn’t come around too often (and when they do, you can imagine the state of things passed on). The suitcases that we do have either have broken zippers, jammed up wheels, broken handles, or all three of these ailments. Plus, the suitcases are all black, and I can’t tell you how much time we have wasted in front of the conveyor belt at airports, watching black suitcase after black suitcase go around and around, people grabbing at them with the hope that it belongs to them, then throwing them carelessly back after reading the luggage tag with somebody else’s name and address.

We want sturdy, bright, and sensible luggage and accessories for this upcoming trip. With my aversion to paying too much for too little, we are looking at a ton of good quality, economical luggage sets from Cymax that fit our budget and make me feel as though I’m not throwing money away. Maybe with the savings I keep after purchasing my suitcases, I can afford to gamble a little bit. After all, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right?

This is the Story of a Four Poster Bed

Every so often, my mother would venture downtown of the city I grew up in to shop in one of the major department stores for clothes and other items the family needed that could not be found elsewhere. I usually went along, since my presence was needed to try on clothes and help carry parcels. It was a precisely choreographed ritual: shopping first, then lunch at the store’s paddle wheel-themed restaurant, then a tour of the furniture department. Until I grew “too old,” (translation became a teenager) traipsing beside her looking at furnishings was my favorite mother-daughter outing.

Don’t laugh. She made it fun. She had great style and fashion sense. She’d share little comments about what she liked and didn’t like. She had sense of humor I didn’t appreciate until much later in life, but on these excursions, that is what I remember the most—laughing with my mom against a backdrop of bedroom, living room and dining room furniture groupings.

It was on just such an excursion that I fell in love. We had worked our way through the adult bedroom section and had turned a corner into the children’s area and there it was. My mother, who erroneously thought she still had my attention, continued chatting. On display was a complete French Provincial bedroom set in a creamy white finish with gold edging: a twin four poster bed with a pink, white and gold canopy, two nightstands, a double dresser, a chest of drawers, a writing desk with matching chair and a seat cushion in the same pattern as the canopy and a toy box/padded bench in pebbled white and gold material. I wanted it—all of it—the whole thing. It was the most beautiful room I had ever seen.

Mother had looked at the display and had already moved on. When she realized that I had grown roots and wasn’t budging, she backtracked. Until now, the largest thing I had ever asked for was a bike. After I had stated my request, she laughed…gently and then reminded me that: a) you’d need a very large room to fit all of the pieces on display into one place; b) I had a sister; and c) I shared a room with aforementioned sister.

I didn’t care. I wanted what I had seen. It was so beautiful I just knew that if I had a room that looked like that, it would change my life. I would be a different person; the world would be a better place.

With the single-minded intensity children possess at that age (I was nine), I embarked on a campaign of persuasion—the Battle of the French Provincial Bedroom Set had begun. At the end of the blitz, everyone---immediate family, relatives, friends, acquaintances and strangers in the street knew what I wanted for Christmas.

Christmas Eve arrived. At bedtime, I was told that I had to sleep on the spare cot in my parents’ room since my sister seemed to be running a slight fever and my mother didn’t want me to getting sick too. I didn’t think anything of it—who can you trust if you can’t trust your mother?

On Christmas Day, before any presents were opened, it became quite clear to me that none of them were big enough to hold an entire bedroom suite, French Provincial or otherwise. And although, technically I hadn’t got what I most wanted, I received some pretty neat things. I didn’t say a word about canopy beds. When the living room had been tidied up, I was sent off to my room to get ready to go to my grandmother’s house.

I opened the bedroom door. And screamed. In the place of my old bed was a white four poster bed. No accompanying pieces of furniture; no canopy; no gold edging. I’m a fast learner—I asked for A and got B. End of story. Still, it was a bed of my own and in its own right, it was pretty impressive. It was Victorian, had pineapple tops, turned posts and bun feet. Actually, it was quite beautiful and comfortable. But secretly I harbored an unspoken grudge.

I grew up, I moved out, I moved on, but the bed always followed me. Over the course of several years, it became harder to reconcile a twin size white bed in a full grown woman’s bedroom. When I voiced this opinion to my mother, she said I could always have it restored to its original color. What? Its original color was white. Wasn’t it?

And that’s when the real story of the four poster bed was revealed. At nine, it never occurred to me that my parents simply didn’t have the money for a new bedroom set. They did the next best thing. They found a second hand four poster through a friend of a friend, whose mother was moving out of the home she had shared with her husband and into a small apartment. My bed had been brought from the Old Country by the senior woman’s parents, and my father told me, by his reckoning, must be just over a hundred years old. Made of solid mahogany, my father also mentioned that it broke his heart when he painted it white.

Eventually though, I did take my mother’s suggestion and had it stripped and restored to its original color, a golden coffee color with “light” in it. I had it professionally done and the restorer, after returning it to me in its refinished glory, offered me a great deal of money for it.

At last! I could get my revenge on this Victorian interpretation of a French Provincial dream. But I just couldn’t do it. The four poster bed, in some strange way, was still a connection, after all these years, to my mother, to her ingenuity, creativity and sense of humor. And that, I just couldn’t part with.

Double Oh #: A License to Accommodate

What’s the worst $14.75 (plus shipping and handling) that you’ve ever spent? As a typical twelve year old boy beginning to experience the thrush of puberty, few things could have been more inherently appealing than a certain ad I came across in the back pages of my X-men comic. A pair of good looking shades that would not only fit my burgeoning identity but also featured an X-Ray function to see through all manner of animate and inanimate material as I saw fit!

My dad scoffed a little, but I wish he had taken a little more than a “hey, it’s your paper route money” attitude as the bank teller changed my 20$ bill into a money order. Several weeks later, I received a pair of flimsy plastic, ray-ban themed shades with pathetically matching black plastic lenses and an “instruction pamphlet” that did nothing more than rub salt into the wound. Pops just smiled as I complained at length. No response, just a big old grin.

When it comes to products that served dual purposes, no one had it better than James Bond. Wouldn’t you agree? He had a wristwatch with an ultra practical garrote wire for those times when the comparative quiet of asphyxiation was preferable. Who wouldn’t want a pair of suspenders with a built-in grappling cord for when there’s no other way out of the building than down the side of it? His Mont Blanc fountain pen with its most appealing nitric acid dart function was the stuff of envy. 007 had the best in multi-function items, including my personal favorite – the .30 caliber ski pole from The Spy Who Loved Me. I’m not exaggerating when I say I think about it at some point nearly every time I’m on the hill.

Unfortunately, most of us have to settle for more commonplace applications of hybrid function technology, but that’s not to say there aren’t a few gems out there. While both the common man and a secret agent could appreciate the practicality of a compass watch or maybe even an am / fm flashlight, I’m thinking more domestically here. Few things are more practical and welcome in the home than a sleeper sofa, and here in the 21st century we’re fortunate enough to be able to peruse Cymax Stores Online and their large and competitively priced selection of convertible sofas from home. Versatility is the key, and the ability to tuck a children’s sleeper chair or an adult sleeper chair into a storage space and pull it out when guests necessitate its use is sure to be a welcome application for both yourself and your extended family. The same can be said for a children’s sleeper sofa in its being a most useful convenience for older or larger youth who need a little more space during the sleepovers that all kids insist on having from time to time.

The ability to accommodate your guests comfortably with a sofa bed is a reassurance that appeals to all who don’t have the luxury of an additional guest room, or one at all, in their home. A comfortable and suitably spacious place to repose and sleep well is sure to be provided with one from Cymax Stores. The model that is not only a sofa and a bed, but a submersible escape pod with satellite-guided armaments?

You’ll have to talk to Q at MI6 about that one.