So four nights before Christmas I had a three hour “experience” driving to Newark Airport to pick up Prince Charming, aka my son. Since they opened the enhanced Terminal A, the few times I’ve still flown out of old terminal C, it’s been nothing but a cakewalk. Nobody is there. It’s as if you now have a personal terminal with concierge service allowing you to come and go as you please – how civilized. Alas, when they moved all of the workers from C to A and its Christmas time and there is an ungodly overload of humanity flying in, they don’t have the workers to man Terminal C. When you drive into the airport complex you enter a lit up wonderland, but not the good kind. You quickly start wishing you had taken that third blood pressure pill. The roadway approaching terminal C is like the wild wild west. The closest analogy I can think of is that it’s like being in a slow-mo version of a demolition derby with no rules. It was every man, woman and child for themselves. What makes this endeavor a multifaceted challenge is that trying to get your luggage is like being in medieval times where the workers have lost the gift of speech and nothing requiring electricity is operational. After an hour of sitting in this chaos I started thinking, “Ya know, junior might have really enjoyed a cross country bus trip - definitely next year.”
What made the nightmare trip to the airport excruciatingly more enjoyable was that the week before, I blew up every nerve ending in my back when I thought I was 22 years old, again. We had ordered a new bed, as the existing torture device we owned for over ten years had imploded. The trench I was trying to sleep in had a crevasse as deep as the Grand Canyon. We ordered this new bed online (actually my wife did) and it came in multiple shipments, each weighing three tons. So we hired a burly Taskrabbit person to put it together and assist with the heavy lifting. My wife asked me, “Do you think we need two rabbits?” I, being a painfully cheap moron said, “Nah, I can help the guy.” Remember, in my delusional state I’m “22” and it only gets better. Because they charge you extra to move the furniture up and down steps, I decided I could move the new stuff up the stairs by myself...saving pennies in comparison to the expensive back brace I now need to buy. (A really sad part of this story is that I almost got a hernia getting the boxes off my driveway into the house. I’m not sure what part of my brain blocked that memory out and allowed me to think that dragging said boxes upstairs was a viable option.)
As I spiraled into full on dementia, I also thought I could move the old king size mattress downstairs by myself. My thinking was, I’ll be going down stairs, how hard would it be? Somewhere deep in my gray matter I was picturing this mattress walking itself down the stairs, opening the front door and parking itself on the curb. Then I woke up and found out it weighs 9 tons. It was as if it was soaking wet, which might have been the case. But that’s another issue I’ll be following up on at the urologist’s office next week - I’m hoping he does hernias too. Needless to say I could barely stand up the old bed mattress let alone move it. Then Mr. Rabbit and I proceeded to bringing it down the stairs. I was like a rag doll being dragged behind. I also found out the hard way that our beautiful wood head and footboards...well they may have looked like wood, but they had to be made out of lead. I figure once I get this body cast off, I’ll be ready to try driving again, once I re-learn how to walk. Hoping for a kinder, gentler New Year.
