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E-mail StoryHerb Benham: Saga of picnic tables comes to dramatic conclusion
| Sunday, Jul 27 2008 12:41 PM
Last Updated: Friday, Jul 25 2008 11:40 AM
This is the way life is.
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You live in Seattle or you live in Bakersfield. It rains 37 inches or it rains hardly at all. There are forests thick with trees or the trees are scattered like solitary beacons crying, “Do not give up hope.”
I mean this:
Four weeks ago, I didn’t have a working picnic table. The legs on the old wooden table had rotted away. The tempered glass in the round green table had exploded and the replacement glass cost $150.
“You could almost buy a new table for that,” said a nice man from one of the glass shops who advised against spending $150, even with him.
I was stuck. I had a table, but no table top. I could stretch a sheet over it and as long as we ate light. We were OK, but what we really were was out of the picnic business.
Kathy Torchia called. She had a piece of glass for the round table that she was selling for $25. There is a time for negotiating but this wasn’t it. I told her I’d take it.
The only problem was she lived off White Lane. That qualified as being way-out-there. In order to save gas, I took the Japanese car rather than the truck.
Kathy is among Bakersfield’s best. Connections materialized where heretofore none had seemed to exist. Her son Ben was a friend of Katie, our oldest. Her mother, Pinky Holbrook, was a friend of my mother and a Democrat who, much to her chagrin, had raised eight Republicans.
Although Kathy was a willing seller, the glass wouldn’t fit into the Japanese car. I required the truck, but the truck was two ZIP codes away.
I told her I’d return later. Going to White Lane is a trip for which you have to be psyched up. That or be granted a change of seasons.
I started working on the picnic table with the rotten legs. I sanded the top, replaced the legs, crooked as the new ones were. It was a workable picnic table as long as it was posted on the side of a hill.
A couple of days ago, my father-in-law called. They no longer had room for their wrought-iron picnic table and six chairs and asked if we wanted it.
“I should just put it in the paper and sell it,” John said. “Do you know how much that table cost?”
No, I didn’t. What I did know was that he was eager to tell me so as to create a reservoir of gratitude from which he could make periodic withdrawals. I asked him how much.
“It cost a lot of money,” he said. “We bought it from Randy Urner’s Out Side.”
John was torn. He wanted to give me that table but realized I didn’t really deserve it. It was the classic father-in-law, son-in-law standoff. What I really wanted, as I’ve told him in the past, was his new Lexus should something happen, God forbid, to either Bev or him.
Sunday, I retrieved the wrought-iron table. Later that day, I fetched the round 48-inch piece of glass from Kathy. I now had three picnic tables.
A couple days later, I called Kathy and thanked her for the glass. I told her about the three tables. She told me she no longer had a picnic table.
There it was. It was either Seattle or Bakersfield. A monsoon or no rain at all.
Opinions expressed are those of Herb Benham, not The Californian.