The other day my wife bought a set of baskets that move along runners in a frame, like the drawers of a bureau, and like the drawers of a bureau, the baskets are meant for storage. There was just one little problem, the frame had to be assembled. Left to my own devices, I would never have bought something that wasn’t fully constructed. I would have feared making a mess of it, taking all day to do so, and at the end, feeling humiliated by my klutziness. But my wife is fearless. She bought all the parts and came home with them in triumph. Furthermore, she intended to assemble the frame herself.
But she was stymied by the first two of the four steps: (1) “Position the side panels, runners facing inward” and (2) “Using a plastic mallet, tap the bottom T-crossbars into the bottom of each side panel.” Unable by herself to keep the side panels separated while attaching the T-crossbars to them, she asked for my help. My heart sinking, I looked at the instructions, and my eyes glazed over. Facing inward? Bottom? Where was the bottom?
After finally determining the bottom, a minor triumph that I felt might be the last one in this endeavor, I hammered the T-crossbars into each side panel. Another triumph! But then my wife noticed that I had hammered the crossbars into the bottom of one panel but into the top of the other. Tempted to throw the whole thing out, I managed to withdraw the crossbars from the top of one side panel, turn the panel around, and again hammer the crossbars into the panel. I then followed the last two steps without incident. My wife slid the baskets into the frame, and we placed it under the bathroom sink. All was now well, aside from the fact that we had taken about 20 times as long to assemble the frame as we should have.
Still, the frame, with the four baskets in it, looks very handsome, as if it had been professionally put together. Nobody will ever know how long it took us to do something that should have required no more than five minutes.
No one will ever know. Which reminds me of a scene in the film, “Urban Cowboys,” in which Billy Crystal’s character, a happily married man, is asked if he would go to bed with a beautiful woman from Venus, who would fly back to her planet right after their lovemaking and never return. "No," he said. "But nobody would ever know," he was told. “I would know,” said Billy Crystal.
And every time I look at that frame, I will know.
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