About a year ago, at the time of
Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival in Dallas, a
Dallas Morning News critic named Thor Christensen wrote a piece on the
history of rock star guitar smashing as ritual. It started off, "The rules of romance say if you love something, set it free. But the rules of rock tell you to smash it to smitereens."
When I first got the sofa, it was true love, but our relationship had lost the spring and shine of love about a decade ago due to trauma inflicted on it by the four men in my life. Sons are rough on a couch, and so is being hauled around to different apartments in a divorce. Too bad I didn't set it free in the property settlement and stick my ex with it. For several years now, the couch has been held up by three sturdy under-the-bed boxes from Target jampacked with
National Geographics, debate trophies,
Magic cards, and role-playing game books. The guys and their friends still found it comfortable enough to throw themselves onto it perfectly so that the three threadbare cushions were never properly pushed down and back under the upholstered back.
Gradually, the sofa became the symbol for my suppressed aesthetic needs, my overcrowded, cluttered condo, and my chronic low-grade financial frustrations. Basically, it came to represent the dark side of being a single mother. Don't get me wrong. My sons are fantastic young men, and I have loved every bit of being their mother. I love being single, too, and this condo has been a wonderful haven for rebuilding a family.
Over 66% of my sons has shared a fondness for Classic Rock with me. My youngest's most vivid tantrum was thrown in the Penneys store at Quail Creek Mall in north OKC while I was trying to purchase a red polo shirt for his dad's thirty-fifth birthday. He threw himself out of the stroller onto the floor, sobbing, kicking, and screaming,
"I NEED my Classic Rock!!!!" And that was just last March.
No, not really. It was March, 1989, but it's gouged in my memory like the carving on a junior high school desk. His room, his incredibly messy, overflowing, sweaty, and oppressively stacked room (See
Exhibit A) where he managed to write his scholarship applications, is decorated with Led Zep, Beatles, Who, Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, and Doors posters.
Exhibit A His brother took the poster of Jimi Hendrix burning his Stratocaster off to college, along with a great one of Stevie Ray Vaughan. The guys have shared John Mayall, Santana, and
Steely Dan concerts with their old mom, along with the aforementioned Crossroads festival.
So perhaps it isn't entirely peculiar that after we received the long-awaited word of my youngest's college destination and the way to finance it, I smashed the davenport. I'm only sorry I wasn't able to set it on fire out in the parking lot. I hauled the cushions to the dumpster, then cut off all the padding and upholstery. I sawed the frame up enough to collapse it for ease of dragging across the parking lot to the dumpster. Climbed up on each side of the dumpster to tip open the double lids, and was well on my way to sliding the sofa carcass up and over, into the mosh pit when a passing jogger decided to help. This is my cathartic transition into empty-nesting------tidy, spacious, relaxing, soothing, white-walled, fingerprintless, tastefully decorated, eclectic-style empty-nesting (See
Exhibit B)!
Exhibit B
You're never too old to rock and roll. On guitar-smashing, Eric Clapton told Christensen, "To me, it's show biz. I don't see much value to it, to be honest." I didn't see much value in keeping the sofa, either. Now, I've got to find my cd.
No, those aren't my ankles.
This is how my parents save plastic grocery bags.
