Posted by saw on September 9, 2004, at 3:01:23
The Story of Grady
from "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" by Robert Fulghum
It all began seven years ago when Grady moved out of his marriage and out of his house, and into a bachelor apartment.Temporarily, or so he said. The apartment was a hole - in an old building that had once been pretty classy, but that was now dark, moldy, and depressing. The smell of stale bacon grease pretty well established the ambiance of the building.
He's been temporarily there for seven years. Grady says he's waiting for the future to clarify itself enough so that he can either fix up his present apartment, move into a better set of digs, or maybe move back home with his wife and family. Which is a real laugh because his wife divorced him, remarried, sold the house, and moved to Wyoming five years ago. She is out of it, free and clear. There is some real lunatic optimism loose in Grady's head, because he still doesn't quite believe she's gone and it's all over. Grady doesn't come to hasty conclusions.
He's lived in this crummy apartment for seven years, and for every minute of that seven years he has been down and out about how awful the apartment makes him feel. He hates to come home to it at night. Says it's so ugly in there. His friends agree. Nobody goes over to Grady's house unless he wants to be depressed.
The walls are gray. The rug is gray. The drapes are gray. So's the furniture. He ought to at least paint the walls. He even knows what colour. Yellow. Two gallons would do the living room, easy. It would be a start. And that's the heart of the problem.
See, if he painted the walls, the furniture wouldn't look good in there and he'd have to have new furniture, which means going shopping, and he doesn't have time to go shopping, and interior decorators are too opinionated and trendy, so he doesn't want one of those, and besides if he is going to buy new furniture, he might as well move on up to a better apartment.
But the kind of apartment he wants is expensive and he'd have to sign a lease and change his phone number and have his stationery reprinted. And if he is going to go to all that trouble and expense, he might as well buy a house, because real estate is going up and up and why wait until he can't afford it?
But buying takes so much time and is such a hassle what with real estate agents and banks and credit checks and all that.
Besides, what if he falls in love in the meantime and she would want kids and there he'd be owning a house in a neighbourhood where the schools are not good, which would mean all the expense of private schools for the children.Or, who knows, his wife may finally decide she made a big mistake in leaving him and would want to come back and there he would be with a house his wife wouldn't want and still having to pay private-school tuition for the children of his second marriage. He'd need a therapist before long, and everybody knows what they cost.
Grady figures a couple of gallons of paint could cost half a million dollars in the long run, and who needs that?
And I agree. It's a risk, I tell him. When the sun finally starts to die and gets hot it turns the surface of the earth into boiling rock, his new house will burn down, and he will regret all the time and trouble gone to waste, and his insurance money and the deposit money on the non-existent children's non-existent private school will be down the drain to boot. In between there will be carpenter ants, inflation, depression, famine, floods, earthquakes, mold, athlete's foot, and entropy. Painting his apartment living room yellow could lead to the end of the world. Grady seems comforted by the depth of my comprehension of the problem.
Grady's stuck. And he thinks getting unstuck and coming unglued are the same thing.
Grady also has this scale problem. Trying to live in several different time frameworks at the same time. He's trying to live today and tomorrow and next week and next year and next decade and next century all at once. And trying to live in his apartment now and in houses yet to come. I tell him he should just buy himself a cemetery plot now, dig a hole in it and pitch a tent over it, and move in. Save all that hassle in between.
We have had enough of Grady. Enough of his being stuck straddling the present and the future. Enough of his moaning and groaning. It was casting a real drag over our poker games.
We decided to shove him headlong into the perils of the next phase of his miserable existence. While he was off skiing one weekend, we bought the lousy paint and repainted his crummy living room. Hauled half his furniture to the Salvation Army, had his rug shampooed, the windows washed, and bought him a potted plant and one goldfish in a bowl so that something alive was in there with him at night.Oh, he appreciated the gesture all right. He even cried about it. Took us all out to dinner and made a great fuss. But he's not happy.
It's the paint you see. The paint's the wrong colour. We used medium yellow. Lighter yellow was what he had in mind. And now if he repaints it, he will hurt our feelings, and if he doesn't, he'll go crazy living with that yellow, so Grady's stuck again.
We sent his ex-wife a sympathy card. And sent Grady a bill for the damned paint.
The only reason I still hang out with him has to do with getting new curtains in our house. You know what getting new curtains means. Grady's one of the few people I know to talk to about what getting new curtains can lead to. In fact, we may form a club called the Damned If You Do and Damned If You Don't Society of America. A subsection of the Fellowship of the Fridge. We'd probably never get a membership going. Most of our kind of folks wouldn't be able to make up their minds whether to join or just wait and see.
Remember: Every journey begins with a single step
Sabrina
poster:saw
thread:388537
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20040907/msgs/388537.html