MATTRESS SALE!

Storytime with Brian:

Spent a good portion of our day Friday mattress shopping. Shopping for me is akin to a surgical strike: Reconnaissance followed by a quick stab that has me leaving the store with the item I wanted along with something sweet for later, all in less than fifteen minutes.

That is not, apparently, how one shops for a mattress. Mattress shopping involves testing out mattresses while having awkward conversations with masked people standing there watching as you lie in a bed with your wife in a comically open and public space. Every time we went into a mattress store - and there are many mattress stores - we were asked "what can we do for you?" Apparently saying "sell us a mattress" is too obvious a thing to say.

I found myself wishing there were a Dairy Queen nearby so I could shop for mattresses the way Dave Barry shops for cars - namely, ambling around the lot with a chocolate-dipped cone and looking at stickers until a salesman appears and ambling away fast enough to cause sonic booms. But that, alas, is also not how one shops for a mattress.

Today involved simply buying the mattress we shopped for yesterday. That took an hour. And proved once again that my well of small talk, historically never very deep, was shallowed to comic proportions by the previous day's activities.

And I will have to dip into the well again, as I will be "in charge" the day the new mattress is delivered.

That's my courageous story.