Arts & Manners: Fold! Spindle! Mutilate!

Not so much that I needed the new bed as that I deserved it, I thought, as a reward for undertaking the move of all my worldly goods across the street after four years in an undersized flat. So, aswedoin Boston, I walked downtown to the Great Department Store, one of those We Won’t Be Undersold-type Great Department Stores, and ordered a new box-spring, mattress and frame. That was August 1970, a month before I moved across the street.

Then I contemplated my finances— I was a graduate student bogged down in the last stages of churning out a PhD dissertation, teaching part time, living humbly—and decided that a necktie would do as my present to myself. Done, said I, and then called the GDS, canceled the box-spring and mattress and said, “But deliver the frame anyhow.”

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Andy Drubdovi

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Not so much that I needed the new bed as that I deserved it, I thought, as a reward for undertaking the move of all my worldly goods across the street after four years in an undersized flat. So, aswedoin Boston, I walked downtown to the Great Department Store, one of those We Won’t Be Undersold-type Great Department Stores, and ordered a new box-spring, mattress and frame. That was August 1970, a month before I moved across the street.

Then I contemplated my finances— I was a graduate student bogged down in the last stages of churning out a PhD dissertation, teaching part time, living humbly—and decided that a necktie would do as my present to myself. Done, said I, and then called the GDS, canceled the box-spring and mattress and said, “But deliver the frame anyhow.”