Today, while working on my other website, I spent 45 minutes dealing with Dreamweaver’s proclivity for formatting bulleted lists with all different sizes of round discs. I concluded that Dreamweaver arbitrarily sets the disc size in the WYSIWYG design view, and there’s little recourse but to delve into its messy HTML code and manually set the size of each freaking. Little. Bullet. Disc.
I decided to take a walk. The afternoon was mild though windy, and the sound of melting snow and chirping birds calmed me as I strolled down the quiet residential street. About 1/4 mile from my home, I came upon a stockpile of discarded furniture set upon the curb for tomorrow’s trash collection.
The trash-picking tendency that I inherited from my father nagged at me to stop and inspect the offerings. There was a large, sagging recliner with stained orange upholstery; a full-sized futon mattress; a wicker end table with dozens of cracked strands; and a straight-backed faux-wood chair with curved arms and a wide, brown pleather seat.
The chair caught my eye. The faux-wood was peeling a bit and it was cheap-looking, but it was structurally sound and I liked the spacious seat. We could use another random chair at our place, and it was manageable enough to carry home without causing a spectacle.
As I mentally prepared myself to actually pick a neighbor’s trash, a Ford truck drove up and parked across the street. A pudgy older man wearing clean overalls and a plaid cap with ear flaps emerged and beelined to the recliner without looking at me. I started to pick up my chair when he said, “Hey there, ma’am, can you help me lift this into my truck?”
He seemed pained to ask this of a woman, but perhaps the fact that I was a fellow trash-picker mitigated his distress. “Okay,” I said. He went over to his truck and opened the rear gate.
“You take the top,” he said, bending over to get a grip on the base. “Shouldn’t be too heavy. Just an awkward weight, you know?” We lifted together and leveled the chair in the air, then slowly walked over to the truck and put it down beneath the open gate.
He suggested that I stand on the open-air cargo bed to guide the recliner while he lifted. For some reason The Silence of the Lambs flashed in my brain, that part when the killer lures a victim into his van by asking her to help him move a piece of furniture. But obviously this would not happen in an open-air cargo bed, so I climbed up and tried to pull in the recliner while he heaved it into the air. With some difficulty, we were successful.
“Hey, thanks,” he said. He smiled, although it was a stiff smile of an old man who does not smile often. “Thanks.”
“No problem!” I said. He waved to me when he started up his truck, and I waved back. I was smiling broadly and suddenly eager to abscond down the street carrying my straight-backed faux-wooden chair.
