My Worst Nightmare

My Worst Nightmare

This morning I decided to go to the Market, our local deli, to get a breakfast burrito to share with Candice and an Asahi Bowl for Kim. When I walked in I immediately saw the glass case with the fresh donuts. There was only one person in front of me in line and I stood my respectful six feet away from him while the counter girl finished her tasks and turned to serve him. He was wearing pajama bottoms and a Henley shirt that he was filling out like Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was big and tanned and buff, so when he politely said to the clerk “I need some donuts”, I couldn’t help but smile at his turn of phrase. I paused to consider how to make my observation without offending anyone. Then I said through my mask (I was the only person watching enough MSNBC to be concerned about the Delta Variant apparently), “You are a man after my own heart. Few people recognize that they actually NEED donuts. Bravo.” That had the intended effect and both he and the clerk laughed.

Then he went about selecting more than a dozen donuts from the very limited selection this little deli stocked. At one point, as he kept adding one and two more to his order, the clerk said, “why don’t you just take them all?”

It was at that point that I felt I had to intercede, but that it was required that I do so in jest to keep the Sunday morning mood light. So I simply said, “This is my worst fucking nightmare, the guy in front of me buying all the donuts while I am forced to look on helplessly.” Once again, this got a good laugh, but this time it was not a chuckle, but a belly laugh and smile as he and the clerk looked back at me in my mask and my grey t-shirt that proclaims boldly, “The Time is Always Right to Do What is Right. – Martin Luther King Jr.”

I got the last three donuts and all was well with the world. I then went about my outdoor chores knowing that I would be staying home for the day with Betty while Kim and Candice went for a day on Point Loma and Old Town. While watering the plants in the garden and staring at the whirligig we were given by my sister Kathy, it occurred to me that I should perhaps look online for a place to go buy the wind sculpture Kim and I had agreed we would place on the concrete pad below the north side of our deck. It is an unusual platform that’s about 10pm x 10’ that doesn’t seem to have any particular purpose. This time it was Kim that had said we should find something to adorn that spot. On our cross-country travels I had seen some wind sculptures in Vail and had noted them as strong candidates for that bare spot we were looking to fill.

I started by looking online for places near us to go buy something since it seemed to me that there must be such things on offer in a place like San Diego. I even called my sister to ask where she had gotten hers and if she knew a place that sold a variety of them. She had lived in San Diego for almost forty years after all, so there was a good chance that if it existed, she would know about it. She mentioned a certain garden center, but when I went online I found no decent local references of offerings and I found a wealth of good whirligigs in several different online stores. The best all seemed to come from a gallery in Sedona, which, like Vail, is the sort of town that would have such frivolities, since these wind sculptures serve no purpose but to spark the imagination and sense of wonder.

One particular Sedona gallery had perhaps 200 or more styles and sizes of wind sculptures available. I shopped around a bit more than is my habit and finally settled on a style called Twisted Oval, which seemed the right blend between the traditional paddle-arm helixes and the more thematic round styles like ones called Nebula and Galaxy. There were copper ones with an abundance of patina and stainless steel ones that had that brushed steel look about them. I decided that stainless steel would work best for our home, so what was left was to determine the size I wanted. These things came in every size imaginable. They listed them as the traditional Small, Medium, Large and Extra Large, but there were some styles that went to Huge and Extra Huge. It turns out you can spend almost as much as you want on your yard adornments like wind sculptures.

I uncharacteristically went to the trouble to measure the height of the deck from the concrete pad and was surprised to find that it was higher than I had thought. I determined that if we wanted to enjoy the whirligig from the deck, we would need something that was over ten feet tall. When I looked at the offerings available for the Twisted Oval, they had only Large and Extra Large. Extra Large was 135” tall. By my math that’s over eleven feet and just right, so I hit the bid, as they say.

As I started wondering how I would install my new purchase, I decided to call the gallery with a question or two. While discussing the exact dimensions of the support pole, I also asked about delivery times and was told it would take up to 14 weeks. On a lark, I asked if they had floor models to look at in Sedona. He told me they had over two hundred. I asked about the XL Twisted Oval and he looked it up. Yes, they had one that had just arrived and wasn’t even put up outdoors yet. Was it available if I wanted to pick it up? Why, yes it was. We then discussed the dimensions of the item and sure enough, it would just fit into my SUV.

Now, Candice is scheduled to fly to Prescott tomorrow, so I called Kim and Candice, who were on the road and asked if 1. Candice wanted a ride to Prescott rather than fly, and 2. If Kim felt like a road trip to Sedona (the next town beyond Prescott in central Arizona). They were both interested and willing. I then called my friend Steve, who lives in Phoenix and knows the route from Phoenix to San Diego very well. Did he feel it was a doable two-day round trip and would he and Maggie like to come up to Sedona for dinner with us. He said they would, but why didn’t we just drive down and eat at their house and stay with them rather than look for a hotel in Sedona in mid-summer. After doubling back with Kim, the gallery and Steve, the trip was set in stone. We did not have enough other plans for the next two days that we weren’t able to reschedule a few things and make it all work. So, there we are, back here for a few weeks and in possession of a new car that we are going, as Willie Nelson would say, on the road again.

I have plotted out the trip. We will cut across the San Jacinto through Palm Springs and over into Arizona on Rt. 10 until we find Rt. 89 that angles up to Prescott, where we will drop Candice. From there, we go up to the gallery in Sedona and load up the whirligig and then down to Phoenix to Chez Larsen for dinner and the night. We have to be back by 3pm Tuesday for Kim’s singing class, but that looks to be no problem if we get an early start. It will be good to see Steve and Maggie and it will be good not to have to wait fourteen weeks for my whirligig. My worst nightmare when it comes to an impulse purchase is to not be able to fuel the impulse with instant gratification.