As my loyal fans (both of you – hi, Mom) know, I have suffered through a number of adjustments in moving to
Huntsville from New York City. But this time I’ll give you a break from my tales of woe to share with you some of my enjoyable lifestyle modifications.
Take, for instance, the dishwasher. In New York, dishwashers were owned only by the very, very wealthy; people so wealthy they never actually saw their own kitchens, the kitchen being a room designated for the hired help. The rest of us not only had no hope of a dishwasher, we didn’t really have a kitchen. My “kitchen” consisted of a refrigerator, a miniature oven and a sink shoved into the corner of my living room. I stored off-season clothes in the oven, since closet space was just an urban myth.
And I am positively in love with my washing machine. A machine located in my own home that will wash my clothes any time I tell it to. I no longer have to worry about a bum wandering in off the street and stealing my still-damp underwear from the dryer. The first time I used my new washing machine I spent a good 30 minutes trying to figure out where the quarters go.
In addition to all the machinery that has contributed to my new and approved lifestyle, there’s the SPACE! Closets! A bathroom that does not require climbing over the tub in order to get to the toilet! A whole room, attached to the house, devoted just to your car. A car – a machine that waits patiently for me, wherever I last left it, to take me anywhere I want to go! A life-sized couch in the living room! Furniture at all! I admit I went a bit nuts with the furniture-buying when I first moved here. The luxury of not having to worry about what will fit, or how to get it in the house, was intoxicating.
When I first moved to New York City I purchased the first real piece of furniture I had ever owned: a brand-new sofa. But when they attempted to deliver my sofa they could not fit it through the narrow stairwell. Which was just as well, since it turned out even if it had, it still wouldn’t have fit through my apartment door.
This is when the deliveryman introduced me to the Take-Apart Man, a whole profession that I never knew existed. The take-apart men subsist off those who live in walk-up brownstones with staircases about a foot and a half wide, capable of accommodating only the starving models attracted in droves to New York City - or a person of my size, if one does not mind turning sideways and scuttling up the stairwell crab-like. The Take-Apart Man will come to your apartment building and, for a mere $300, take apart the brand new sofa you just purchased, carry it up piece meal to your apartment, and reassemble it. Although I suffered several minor heart attacks watching him tackle my sofa in the lobby with various sharp implements, I had to admit having the sofa actually inside my apartment was a lot more convenient.
That sofa deteriorated significantly over the next several years but I never replaced it, because I could not bear to go through that ordeal again. Spending an additional $300 to get a brand-new stranded sofa into the apartment seemed, at the time, fair enough. Spending $300 to disassemble a dilapidated piece of crap in order to get it out of the apartment was too unfair to contemplate. I toyed with the idea of simply taking an ax to it myself but somehow I sensed that would probably lead to a disaster involving sirens. And so that sofa remained until I moved out of the apartment and grudgingly re-admitted the Take-Apart Man for the final time.
In Huntsville I have a house, and in this house there are double doors leading into every room except the bathroom, which, although it’s the size of my old
New York apartment, doesn’t really need a sofa anyway. I went out and found the two biggest sofas I could to go in my new big living room, and added an entire TV wall unit for good measure.
I do not miss the Take-Apart Man, but I send him my fondest regards. I have a new best friend now: the Lawn Guy.
