Once Upon a Mattress

Once upon a time, Brian and I were asked to pick up my parents’ new mattress set from Denver Mattress and haul it the 18 miles to their house. Brian, in his best engineer mode, made sure to strap the pieces down separately before securing the entire load, checking and rechecking connections and pulling multiple straps tight. I remember stepping out of the truck to snap a picture of him with my cell phone while my two girls waited patiently in the back seat. I couldn’t help but find some mix of pride and endearing humor in his focus and effort. My memory is growing fuzzy now, but it seems as though at least one of us made some sort of cocky remark about “that thing not going anywhere…”

What was it they said about the Titanic? Yeah...so…

Right after we merged onto the highway and had gained speed to hang with traffic, I looked over my shoulder to see the entire mattress lift up vertically, catching the wind like a giant marshmallow kite, and fwoppfh. Sucker was gone. My small eyes became suddenly huge, and I heard myself saying a word unfitting of a God-fearing woman in the cab of a small truck with two children under the age of three. Brian pleaded for me to be joking, but since I wasn’t, he calmly proceeded to find a place to turn around and go back, which happened to be an exit onto another highway a quarter of a mile up the road. We stopped in the highway patrol camp-out spot in the grassy median between north and south-bound traffic to check the box spring, which was still firmly anchored in place, and were soon found by a friendly state trooper who offered to loop back ahead of us and check for our runaway. Our best assessment of the situation with the mattress was that the end of one of the straps bent/broke/gave way. I don’t remember the specifics of what went wrong with the straps with half the clarity with which I recall the incredulous, dejected look on my poor husband’s face.  

To cut this long story short, after spending something like 45 minutes trolling the same 2-mile stretch of roadway and calling local businesses and the Wichita police, we came up completely empty handed. A conversation with the WPD enlightened me that mattress theft is apparently a “thing” and that someone more than likely swooped up the mattress and made off with it...in the 5 minutes it took us to get re-anchored and turned around to look for it. My imagination still runs wild at the thought of how someone would accomplish this--especially on an overpass of a busy highway. I tend to envision two or three scrappy men hanging out the back of a dilapidated truck employing moves that combine the stealth of ninjas with the haphazard yet ballsy choreography of rodeo clowns.

We ended up back at Denver Mattress with 15 minutes until closing. Brian, looking more deflated by the minute, stayed in the car with the girls while I went into the store and traded my pride for an exceptional deal on a replacement mattress for my parents. At the loading dock behind the store, Brian used half a box of twine and tied it in a complex spiderweb of knots over the mattress.

Somewhere along the road to my parents’, the humor of the situation hit me. With a laugh in my voice but sincerity in the overall message, I looked at Brian and said, “I know; let’s play the I Am Thankful Game!” I continued, “I am thankful the mattress didn’t cause a giant pile up on the highway. I am thankful our girls stayed happy this whole time. I am thankful the state trooper was nice and didn’t ticket us for losing the mattress or stopping where we weren’t supposed to. I am thankful we are in a financial position that we can afford the new mattress for my parents. I am thankful…”

All I got from Brian was a restrained yet cautionary, “Lace.”

At my parents’, we were greeted at the door with a “You made it!” and a sarcastic, “Didn’t lose it on the highway, at least!” Inside, I was dying, but I put on the best game face of my life, even when it took a serrated knife and several minutes to free the mattress from the careful net Brian had crafted to keep it in place. I deleted the photo evidence from the previous mattress-securing attempt from my phone.

True to form for me, though, once we left my parents’ house, I called my sister and rehashed the evening’s events, laughing until I could barely breathe.

Amazingly enough, my mother didn’t hear anything of this until I told her about it just a couple of weeks ago. I figured enough time had passed that she could see the story as bizarre and funny without feeling guilty for our hassle or obligated to repay us for the mattress that we so generously donated to some opportunistic family on West Kellogg. She seemed to roll with it pretty well, so I felt as though I could finally share it with the masses.

Looking back, I have a few more “I am thankfuls” to add to the list from the game. I am thankful to be married to a husband who handled such an exasperating experience with such quiet self-restraint and grace, in spite of my bad habit of laughing in the midst of misfortune. I am thankful for his leadership, for his kindness, for his provision. And I am thankful for the laughter that has come from this for us--even Brian.

And we’re all living happily ever after.

The end.