By Joe Cobb Crawford
If we’re honest, we must admit we each have at least one of them. You and possibly one other family member know about it. Our secrets are safe there, just below the radar of guests invited to our home.
They hold treasures of everyday life, reflect our family values, and store a history of our thoughts, feelings, and acts. The hidden treasure is important, but maybe not important enough to secure away as most intelligent people would do.
What am I talking about?
It’s “The Drawer.”
This drawer is not the one where weekly you organize and store your socks and undergarments. It’s also not the drawer where professionally prepared legal documents like the house mortgage are sequestered.
This drawer is that haven of refuge where “Stuff” is put away for the time being. Things like, an instruction manual written in four languages for a coffee maker you trashed nine years ago. Or, donation request letters from an organization whose cause you felt passionate about six months ago.
Less important Stuff resides there—things like a game schedule for a sports team you knew would rise to the top last year, but didn’t.
Lastly, “The Drawer” holds documents containing way too many of those “pesky little details”—the ones you have to deal with daily in our Techie world. One of the incarcerated escaped from “The Drawer” at our house today. The consequences are still pending.
My wife is an infrequent, but sporadic impulse buyer. She recently purchased an amazing machine having a “happy or money back” guarantee. This miracle machine promised easy weight loss. The lucky owner needed only to place raw vegetables in the machine which turned the vegetables into weight losing juice which the owner could drink without limit. The machine’s return paperwork for this miracle machine would be perfunctorily “filed” in “The Drawer” with the other “Stuff.”
While my son and his family visited, an attempt was made to assemble the miracle weight loss juicer machine. Four people labored on this project. I’m a licensed engineer, but I wanted no part of this endeavor. My grandson, who could take apart and reassemble a Rubix Cube by the time he was 12, also helped.
This machine had more intricate parts than a NASA Lunar Lander. After about an hour into the project they sensed something was wrong—something was missing. They were stumped and decided to take up the project later—which they didn’t.
A week later, my wife—now none the slimmer—disassembled the miracle juice machine and placed it back into the two jumbo boxes it came in. Plans were made to ship it back. All that was needed was the return paperwork.
She searched frantically throughout the house and her car for the return documents. No papers found. Then she remember – “I’ll bet I put that stuff in ‘The Drawer.’ ’”
She looked in “The Drawer.” I looked in “The Drawer.” We both Dumpster Dived into the trash can. Gone! No return papers found for the amazing weight loss juicer machine.
However, I am happy to announce a discovery I made: “The Drawer” now has two sibling drawers. Anyone need the return papers for Ginseng Knives?
From: River of Words: An Anthology, Volume I
Clarkesville Writers Society