Free Candy and Bumper Stickers

Tightwads are the kind of people who use free tickets just because they’re free.  It doesn’t matter if their time would be better spent doing something else; if the tickets are free, why not?  They’re open to any new adventure, as long as it’s free.  Free equals fun.

I am the product of a long line of tightwads.  I’m a tightwad infant compared to the rest of my gene pool.  My people are the ones you see trying to pass off as senior citizens while still in their 40’s, just to get the early bird special at Denney’s.  I hate Denney’s.  A true tightwad doesn’t have the discernment to dislike Denney’s.  What tastes better than a discount?

My oldest son got a new job at Adobe Systems.  He’s never worked at a place where he didn’t have to wear a name tag or a uniform, so that’s one reason he loves this job.  The other reason is the free stuff.  Tightwads love free stuff.  He is obviously in my gene pool.

“I had a great day today at work,” he says.  “We had free pizza, so I have leftovers in the car.  I don’t have to shop for food all weekend.  And I got free tickets to the Home Show.  You want ‘em?”

A tightwad says yes.  “Yes,” Charlie says.  “What Home Show?”

“I don’t know,” Evan says.  “They were free, so I got two.  I took the tickets so I could go and get free samples.  You can have ‘em.  I don’t want to pay for parking.”

We have paid-for carpet ready to install after we finish the messy jobs.  I don’t think either Charlie or I believe we’ll be ready for carpet before summer, so why not prove ourselves right?  When you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, you don’t walk too fast.  We’ve been walking slowly for four years.  We need a day off from our usual days off. 

“It’ll be research,” Charlie says.  “We might find some new products or learn shortcuts.  We need to keep up with the trends.”

We stop at Peet’s first to keep up with the Northwest trend of drinking too much coffee.  This is one trend we’ve grabbed onto with both fists and won’t let go.  We’re afraid of what other trend we might glom onto if we did.  We know people who spend their free time dressing up as cowboys and re-enacting battle scenes from the old West.  Drinking three decaf refills with lots of half and half seems harmless in comparison.

Right about noon, Charlie perks up.  “Are you finished?” he says.  “Are you finished now?  Hurry, let’s go.  Come on.  We’ve got a lot to do today.” 

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.  There’s free stuff.  Let’s go.”

Who am I to question someone willing to waste a day to get a bagful of cheap candy and free bumper stickers?  A normal-looking couple kisses at the table next to us and it’s making me uncomfortable.  That used to be Charlie and me.  Will we do that again when we don’t have camp crap to come home to? 

The fixer is always in the back of our minds, dulling everything.  We’ve had this house longer than we’ve been officially married.  What will we have to bother us when we don’t live here anymore?  I hope we don’t turn our angst onto each other.  I hope we’re happy under all this house misery.  I hope we can finish this house so someday we can make people in Peet’s uncomfortable.

We drove around and around the Coliseum, looking for Home Show signs.  We found a lot of people walking around with mortgage company bags and mops, so we knew we were close.  We pull into a parking structure.

“You here for the Home Show?” the parking attendant asks.

“If we can find it.”

“You’re not the first.  I tell you, they weren’t sober when they got this one ready.  A man must have done it, that’s all I can say.”

“We screw everything up,” Charlie says.  My mom whispers these anti-man things when there aren’t any men around.  She says it about kitchens with bad floor plans, pap smear equipment, and tampons; things about which men might not have good first-hand knowledge.  She’d never say it about signage, not directly to a man.  This parking attendant must have more stress than me.  I wonder if she lives in a fixer, waiting for a man to finish up the bathroom.

We walk right up to the turnstile with our complimentary tickets.  The thrill of literal freedom makes this whole wasted day worthwhile.  We may be wasting our time, but we’re not wasting our money.  We’ll leave that to everyone around us while we find the bathrooms.  All that Peet’s means we get to use free toilet paper.

You don’t want to use the Memorial Coliseum bathrooms unless you want to feel good about the smell of your own bathroom.  You could almost see the smell, it was so bad.  Why is it I’m the one who gets the wet seat?  Isn’t this the women’s bathroom?  If you are going to pee all over the seat, go use the men’s.  It can’t smell worse.  The dry rot Charlie’s pulling out of our own 33 years of peed-on bathroom floor smells better than this.

There’s nothing holding us back now.  Charlie sees an open massage chair at the Relax the Back display.  We have friends with this model, so Charlie ignores the salesman, operates the remote like a pro and settles in.  All his hurrying comes to an end.

The salesman talks to him for a little while, but all he gets out of Charlie are vowel sounds.  I’m looking at brochures and comparing prices.  If I weren’t a tightwad, I might consider buying one of these.  Charlie seems to like it.  It’d be a nice gift.  He’d have to be a doctor or lawyer, though, so I could afford to buy him one.  If we could afford one of these, we wouldn’t have to do fixers.  We could buy a real house and make other people fix it up.  We’d be so relaxed we wouldn’t need massage chairs.  Do you see how fixers change your life?  Do not go gently into that good house deal.

We stop by the ReBuilding Center display and pick up a few free bumper stickers.

“Do you know about our place?”

“We know about it very well,” Charlie tells the woman at the booth.  “We have a garage full of stuff ready to donate whenever we stop going to Home Shows and get back to work on our fixer.”

“I’m doing a fixer, too,” she says.  She doesn’t look like it.  She’s very calm and  speaks in complete sentences.  “I didn’t do your usual buff n’ scuff.  I took it down to the bones.  It was uninhabitable when I started.  Now she’s becoming a beautiful old lady.”

This should make me feel good about doing fixers, but it doesn’t.  All the work we’re doing and we don’t have a beautiful old lady in there anywhere.  All you can coax out of a cheap 70s ranch on a white-trash cul-de-sac is a dirty old man, if you’re lucky.

“Come on people, take one,” a guy holding plastic bags says.  “I got a bag quota I’ve got to give away.”  Nobody wants his empty plastic bags.  We laugh but don’t reach for a bag.  Charlie has his hands full of candy.  He’s good at scooping large quantities from display bowls without even slowing down.

“Nothing will stick or stain this board,” a guy with a too-loud microphone says.  “This board sells on QVC for $20.  They don’t tell you that you’ll have to throw it away after two months.  They don’t tell you the fine print.  You could get two of ours for that price.  That’s a bargain.  We’re 100% made in America.”

I keep listening long after we walk by.  I could have bought one of those boards, even if I don’t currently have a counter to put it on.  I’m a pushover most of the time, but not this time.  When someone’s as pushy as this guy, I don’t have a problem resisting.  Neither, did it appear, did anyone else.  We walked by him a few times and I never saw anyone pull out a wad of cash.

“Why do I feel like I’m at a circus?” Charlie says.

“It shines.  It polishes,” another barker says.  “Just one spray and wipe and you can take off years of tarnish.”

We watch this guy squirt his product on a not-too-dirty hood of what looks like an older mustang or camaro.  “Who knows what he has on that car hood?” Charlie says.  “It could be doughnut glaze he put on there this morning.”

Charlie starts walking quickly to the end of the aisle.  He holds out his hand, gets a couple of cheesecake samples and eats them both before I’ve caught up.  “You didn’t want one, did you?”

“Did it taste like plastic?” I say.  “It looked like plastic.”

“I don’t know,” he says.  “It was free.”

We walk quickly compared to the Home Show mall zombies.  We dart in and out of groups of families while I look for an interesting booth.  There are interesting booths, only because they seem out of place.  “Why are there aromatherapy and dog food booths at a home show?” I ask Charlie.

He can’t answer.  He’s got a face full of the Vita-Mix sample smoothie, given to him by a woman who looked like she’d never followed a recipe in her life.  “You can use this for your fondues, your sauces, your marinades,” she says.  “You’ll have perfect pasta sauce every time.”  I notice the only people who stop to listen are older men.  They’re not so much listening as staring.

“Wine tasting,” Charlie says.  “Look!”

He’s in high free-stuff gear.  He runs to the end of the aisle and asks the pourer for a sample.

“Three for a dollar,” she says.

“To taste?”

“You don’t spit this stuff out.  It’s that good.”

“Let’s go,” he says.  “If we hurry, we can still get free samples at New Season’s.”

I hope I have a few years left before he’s excited about the early bird special at Denney’s.

A little help? [] 6:03:59 PM