Mad Matters

There they were, Father and Mother, a combined 5 master's degrees between them.

"It's 77 by 77."

"No, it's 3 sticks on one side, 3 and a half sticks the other."

"You cannot measure things with sticks! I have a tape measure right here, see 77 inches."

"Why won't you believe me?"

"Look at the hypotenuse, this is a square!"

These are the facts that we know: My parents' new mattress is 77 by 77 inches. Their bed is not. My mother fractured her sacrum in January and is on bed rest for 16 weeks.

As often seen in our political debates, there are facts, and there are people who refuse to believe them. Like Mother.

I came home home last night to discover a giant box in the drive way, one that I had the privilege of lugging upstairs with my dad. It was their new mattress. Mother helped the proceedings by not remaining in bed but commenting how the last time they did this, Father wasn't home (in Taiwan tending then comatose mother) and she did it "all by herself" ... after people lugged it upstairs for her.

Moi: Um... I was here. I helped you move it onto the bed.

Mother: Oh that's right, I did it by myself with you.

Because the bed is not 77 inches by 77 inches but the mattress is, it all looked a little funny at first. So Father and I rotated the mattress by 90 degrees. It looked slightly better. Then Mother insisted that it was "wrong" and asked us to move it another 90 degrees. To appease her, we did. We all agreed that it'd be the last time we'd move it. Then Mother realized that that looked "wrong." Do you sense a pattern here? I moved the mattress another 90 degrees.

That was Part I. The yell-y part came this morning, when, invigorated by a full night's rest, Mother focused on the mattress again (the mattress that we'd rotated to her specifications twice the night before). Father, being the engineer, took out the measuring tape and measured both bed and mattress to figure out where the discrepancies were. The mattress was square. The bed was not. No matter how you tilt it, there'd be a 4 inch gap lengthwise. Mother, being the pianist, took the stick she found on the floor. And you know the rest.

(Oh, you don't? It's a story as old as time itself. The patient on bed rest attempted to move the king size mattress herself. We reluctantly intervened. Thereby rotating the square mattress for the fourth time.)

For those of you keeping score at home, that's Crazy 1, Logic 0, Metric System 0, Father 0, Father's Engineering Degree 0, Mother 1.