cool dry place

Dinner with Sherry’s parents involved a lot of mumbling and introduced me to novel terms like “beaver puke.” I feel uncomfortable around people who choose not to speak in complete sentences. Sherry’s parents think I’m deaf.

She reminded me that my family has its own peculiar dialect too. But ours has nouns.

Somewhere in the wash of clicks and nasalized vowels a story emerged of how my poor stereo has had only an end table and a milk crate to sit on for lo these many months. I think we were asking if they had any spare hardware around that I could hit with something and cut with something else until it looked like a ghetto-chic stereo stand. I think.

There was fried chicken, too.

Last night I came home from work and cooked dinner in my underwear and sat down in my new chair to knit and watch James Burke’s Connections on the internet when Sherry showed up with a great brown slab of cardboard and styrofoam and what I now know is called beaver puke.

“What’s all this, then?” I asked. Watching 1970s BBC programming has affected my diction.

She said, “It’s my birthday present. From my parents. And it’s a stereo stand.”

“Your parents gave you a stereo stand for your birthday?”

“Yep.”

“You don’t have a stereo.”

“Nope.”

“And your birthday isn’t for another two weeks.”

“I know.”

“So did you tell them to take it back and get you a real present?”

“I did.”

But the stereo stand’s back story involves Wal-Mart and old ladies fighting savagely with their sharp elbows and a thousand other complicating matters. There’s the dying wish of the only robot who ever knew true love. There’s an Oboe of Eternity and Nazi archaeologists. The stereo stand isn’t going away.

So we got our Phillips head screwdrivers out and cracked open the box and got to work.

“So much for your mom getting better at gift-giving, eh?”

The pre-drilled holes in the pre-cut particle board were in the wrong places so we improvised. It was evident no Swede had had a hand in the design of our stereo stand. It’s standing now, where my milk crates used to be. And it’s nice. But it presents a predicament.

Sherry’s birthday is two weeks away, and now not only do I need to get her a present that “represents” how I feel about her — with all the love and commitment and appreciation undertones — I also need to get her something good enough to compensate for her parents’ clumsy gifting effort AND for the fact that I (and my turntable) benefited greatly from that effort.

I’m thinking… pony.