By Mike Pound
Globe Columnist
JOPLIN, Mo. —
They’re back.
The redundant pillows on our bed, I mean.
They were gone for a while. I don’t know where they went. I just know that they were gone and that I didn’t miss them.
Sunday afternoon, I walked into our bedroom, ready to get started on my regular Sunday afternoon nap. Some people get lazy and put off taking regular Sunday afternoon naps, but not me. I am, if nothing else, a person of extreme discipline. Besides, the Cardinals game in South Florida got rained out.
By the way, did it not occur to the morons in charge of major league baseball that a baseball team playing in South Florida might have more than the occasional rainout? It’s sort of like acting surprised that it’s still cold in Minnesota in early April.
Anyway, when I tried to lie down on the bed Sunday afternoon, I found my path blocked by roughly 4,593 pillows. Pillows that weren’t on the bed when I woke up Sunday morning.
“WHERE DID THESE ^%@#@!@ COME FROM?” I calmly shouted.
“WHAT?!!!!!” my wife calmly shouted back.
Turns out the pillows came from my wife. She bought them to go with the new head and footboard she bought for our bed. My wife thought that since we had a new head and footboard for our bed, we also needed new redundant pillows.
My wife thought we needed new redundant pillows knowing full well how I feel about redundant pillows. I feel the same way about redundant pillows as I do about Fox News.
I don’t like redundant pillows, is what I’m saying.
You can’t use redundant pillows. Say you want to take a Sunday afternoon nap on a bed containing new redundant pillows. Is it OK to simply lie down on the bed on top of the redundant pillows and use them as Ð follow me here Ð pillows?
What? Were you raised in a barn?
Any male person who has been married for more than a year knows that redundant pillows are not to be used like pillows. Redundant pillows are like hand towels in the guest bathroom.
Nope, what you have to do if you want to take a nap on a bed full of redundant pillows is carefully remove each of the roughly 19,783 redundant pillows and gently place them in a neat row on a chair specifically designed to hold them.
Or you can just toss them on the floor.
You also are not supposed to use the redundant pillows that female people put on furniture. My wife, over the past few years, has placed roughly 184,910 redundant pillows on the couch and love seat in our living room.
By the way, why do they call a love seat a “love seat”? All my life, I’ve never been able to figure that one out. I mean, really, how much loving can two people do in a love seat?
But I’m getting sidetracked here. Because of the roughly 4.5 million redundant pillows on the couch and “love seat” in our living room, it takes me about 45 minutes to find a seat when I want to watch TV in our living room.
“Don’t sit on the pillows!” my wife will yell if I try to sit on our couch.
Then, if I try to remove the pillows, my wife will yell, “Don’t throw the pillows on the floor!”
See, what my wife wants me to do is move the pillows to the side of couch that I’m not using. But when I sit on a couch, I like to use as much of the couch as possible, which doesn’t leave much room for redundant pillows.
Usually what I will do, instead of sharing our couch with roughly a zillion redundant pillows, is go into the kitchen and watch TV at our kitchen counter.
This, of course, makes my wife mad because she doesn’t think we spend enough time with each other. So she will get out of the “love seat” in our living room and join me in the kitchen where I’m trying to watch TV in peace.
We then will watch TV until about 8 p.m., when I decide that it’s time to go to bed. I don’t actually go to bed at 8 p.m. I actually go to bed at 11 p.m.
It just takes three hours to get the roughly 12 squillion pillows off our bed.
Address correspondence to Mike Pound, c/o The Joplin Globe, P.O. Box 7, Joplin, MO 64802, or via e-mail at mpound@joplinglobe.com.
