Another Day in the Country
The other side of the bed
© Another Day in the Country
An acquaintance of mine, who I’m sure would become a friend if I ever spent more time with her, was telling a story about giving her mother a bad time because of all the clutter she had on her bed.
Her story reminded me of my own mother and all the things she, too, kept on the other half of her king-size bed after my dad needed a bed of his own for sleeping purposes.
My mom went to bed every night with her favorite boom box on the right side— sometimes two recorders because she liked to copy music back and forth between them.
This was in the heyday of cassette tapes. She had a plethora of blank tapes that she could fill to her heart’s content.
She accumulated so many tapes that when we were packing to move my parents from Oregon back to Ramona, their hometown, my sister gave Mom the job of “organizing” and hopefully getting rid of some of her tape collection.
An hour later, she returned to see no progress. Mom needed to keep them all.
My mother always kept Kleenex boxes on her bed. She also had pens and paper for writing notes, paper cups, magazines, and sometimes a book or two, even though Mom really wasn’t big on reading books.
She didn’t believe in reading fiction so that cut out a whole category of material for her. I doubt my mother ever darkened the door of a library in her life. How did my mother manage to get a daughter who is so extravagantly different?
“I guess that’s just the name of the game,” I mumble as I drag home another armload of books from the library.
Meanwhile, my acquaintance who may still become a friend said that she told her mother that until she cleaned off her bed there was something she wasn’t going to do for her — essentially blackmailing her mom.
Years and years ago, I wrote a column here in the Record about all the items that accumulated on the dashboard of our friend Tooltime Tim’s pickup.
At the time, I was surprised to see so much stuff strewn across the dash. He assured me it was all necessary, and not to mess with it because he pretty much knew what was there and where it was and didn’t want anyone to muck up the arrangement.
His accumulation of stuff turned out to be a microcosm of Tim’s life, just like the stuff on the bed was for my mother.
Everything Tim needed — in an emergency, supposedly — was on the dashboard of that truck just as the essentials of Mom’s life had accumulated on the other side of her bed.
It was then, I realized — like mother, like daughter — it has become the same for me.
As I’ve gotten older, my bed has become more than just a place to sleep from 11 to 7. It’s also a place to relax during the day.
In anticipation of that relaxation, I come home from the library and toss an armload of books I’ve checked out onto the other side of the bed.
For honesty in reporting, I went into my bedroom to take a look at my bed. It was “made,” so kudos for me, but there was more stuff on it than I thought when I first broached this subject.
There were my glasses — several pairs of them, to be honest: a couple of pairs of regular glasses, different colored frames worn on different days with different clothes, plunked down here at the end of the day when I’d trade them for a pair of magnified reading glasses to look over the influx of reading material.
I had Kleenex, a flashlight, hand lotion, a tube of Neosporin and Band-Aids. I must have dinged myself in the yard.
Sometimes, I go out and get the mail, then plop down on the bed to check what’s there, and it stays a while.
There’s an inhaler and a rug for the cat to lie on at the foot of the bed. There’s my wheat sock, and sometimes there’s more than one because I lose one and then use the other, and they both end up in my bed.
Often my phone lives here under a pillow.
For those of you who share a bed with someone, you may have a hard time relating to this, but I must say it’s much easier to clear off the other side of the bed regularly than it is to sleep with or remove someone who snores.
For more than 30 years, the thing that I reached out to touch on the other side of the bed was my husband. But now, for almost half of my life, it’s been a Kleenex box, my phone, an inhaler, a flashlight — the essentials of nightlife on another day in the country.