The Contest

 

 

I got lured into a magazine contest about love, laughing at first, because I felt inept to comment on the subject. Impatient, not very gushy, I wasn’t someone who wrote essays about love, I made jokes about it. Inexplicably, I found the challenge irresistible.

I listened to favorite musicians, hearing love letters in the lyrics of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Van Morrison, The Who and Percy Sledge; Love could give sight to the blind, and flowers with green grass so tall. When you shiver, love gives you a blanket, and if you swallow anything evil, love is right there at the ready to jam its fingers down your throat. 

 While Jeff was deployed, I splurged on a luxurious mattress pad to help me sleep, converting a king-sized bed into a bed fit for a king.  I loved it.  I knew he would too, when he got home.   

 After Jeff returned from Iraq, he confessed that the mattress topper was bothering his neck and back.  He wanted to get rid of it.  I reacted like he had asked me to remove my kidney, then gently suggested he quit whining and try sleeping on his back.

 As my husband rubbed his aching neck, and I concocted ways to keep the mattress pad, I questioned why love had to be so painful.  I also questioned his military training. What did you sleep on in Iraq, anyway?

Apparently, my heart was ice.  There I was, cursing my husband because the mattress was hurting his back.  (Yes, the same husband who had just returned from war)  What’s ‘a matter, Goldilocks, bed too soft?   

As I wondered how to solve this princess-in-a-pea problem, I yearned for wisdom.  Do I slice the mattress in half?  Maybe if I merely suggest it, as King Solomon once did, I can eliminate my competition.  And where the heck was Percy Sledge when I needed him?  Didn’t he say that…he’d give up all his comforts, sleep out in the rain, if she said that’s the way it ought to be…?

I was a witchy witch.  Not only did I have no chance of winning that contest, I would probably be disqualified.  I needed a miracle.  Or some Van Morrison to …take away my trouble, take away my grief, take away my heartache in the night like a thief…

And then something struck me unexpectedly, most likely an arrow from Cupid’s pouch, because there is no other explanation for what I did next. 

Without any discussion, I hoisted the behemoth pad onto my back and out of the room.  Then I remade the bed, on its sad amputated frame, not fit for a king or even a wicked queen.   

And I smiled. 

Because it was my turn to feel a pain in my neck and back, then my chest, ricocheting itself into my melting heart, which had grown three sizes that day.