One Christmas Eve in Washington D.C., not long after Ronald W. Reagan passes away, four friends and I get in to the last-minute swing of things and decide to get a tree for our apartment. Home Depot has the only sea- sonal gardening department in the District that’s open to our Eleventh-hour shenanigans, but still, pickings are slim—even their Charlie Brown specials are too ugly. The merchant has spared no expense blasting the heat, and one by one we remove our heavy winter gear and pile it into the cart. At last we find our tree and make our way slowly through the winding checkout line, just like the line for Space Mountain.
None of my friends are Gold’s Gym members; we have the combined muscle mass of a pack of marshmallows. But I volunteer to carry Seymour’s Plant on Steroids to the car, leaving a trail of needles for the elves. My contribution complete, I step back to listen to them argue about how to hoist it onto the Jeep.
Between bench-pressing the tree and Home Depot’s heat wave, I’m sweating like Robert Hayes in Airplane, so I get down to my Fruit of the Looms. The car is running, and without thinking, I position myself next to the exhaust pipe to keep warm in the 30-degree parking lot. The next few moments are black.
I’m told I passed out right on a stroller that appeared in my way. The child is unhurt, and the mother isn’t too angry. My friends use the tree as a makeshift cot and lay me out on it to recover.
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Mother's Day At The Orphanage: Stories Without A Home
Non-FictionMother's Day At The Orphanage is collection of semi-autobiographical short stories about odd jobs, fake businesses, mistaken identities, close shaves, and near misses, written by David Leigh Abts and Michael Shattuck, edited by Leslie Blodgett, and...
