Short Story
Nothing In Common
A Simple Story #2 — The Tent
You may remember my friend Calaif from my first installment in this series.
He’s been here quite a while now. By day, he dons his super hero cape and badge and does the door to door green-new-deal-you-really-need-community-solar pitch. And then by night, he wears this dope rich textile jacket and out come his real super powers as a recording artist.
He’s like a real life modern day Clark Kent. Except he doesn’t work at a newspaper, he works on the streets. I won’t say any more about that so I don’t get in any trouble.
Before he got super serious recording, he was busy just sitting around the campfire, channeling Luke Skywalker to my Yoda. Everything was peachy.
Then Labor Day came.
Around here, since we AirBnB every room and tent possible, holidays get nuts.
Every room is full and it’s like a tent city outside too.
I cook up a storm, and everyone loves it. Besides my sage wisdom that comes out after I drink a bottle of sake while I’m cooking, the food is five star. I always tell everyone I’m the best restaurant in the area. Even though I’m not really a restaurant. I just do family dinners when there’s a crowd. Who doesn’t cook for family when they come over? And in my house, all humans are family. Your GATTACA string looks just like my GATTACA string. That makes us related.
Anyway, this past Labor Day was, like usual, a full house, and people were coming from all over the place, like usual, and I was scrambling to make sure I had enough food, sheets, pillows and sleeping bags. And getting the tents ready.
One of the larger tents was booked for a party of 6 or 8, can’t recall exactly — and I went out to dust it out.
I was in for a surprise, because as I unzipped the entrance, I was greeted with ponds of water and seaweed. Okay, maybe not full out seaweed, but it sure did look like guppies and goldfish would have no problems surviving had anyone released some in there.
UGH. I sighed, and resigned that this tent had served it’s last customers and I’d just have to zipline down to Dick’s Sporting Goods and get a new one.
I am a master tent pitcher, so no biggie, I had time. Though it was going to put a crunch into my chefing schedule, but I figured I’d just rustle up some extra sous chef’s out of the resident pool — they were usually willing to help as long as they could eat — and sometimes guests enjoy helping too, because they learn stuff in the kitchen.
I must have clearly been looking stressed to Calaif, because he looked at me and said, “I can help!” in his uber positive voice which he always keeps on hand for any such emergency.
“GREAT!”, I said, and grabbed my car keys. “You take down the tent, and I’ll be right back with the new one.”
He enthusiastically agreed to my plan, and I jumped in the car and sped off to get the new tent. Actually, I got 2 tents, and some extra cots too. I’m a speedy shopper. I hate shopping, so I’m in and out pretty quickly.
When I got back, I found Calaif standing over a hot steaming pile of tent, poles, stakes and lines. I could see he was struggling, so I ran over to try to give him a hand.
I started to pull and tug at poles, which is a crazy job now, since they fold and detach and have elastic inside, which, if you don’t know about tents, just stretches and sometimes snaps, as you pull the hard outer casings apart in an attempt to slide them out of those tent sleeves. It’s all quite maddening if you don’t do things in just the proper way and in just the proper sequence.
So mind you — this photo above is as far as Calaif got in the hour or hour and a half or so that I was away picking up the goods.
As I turned over tent material, trying to make sense of exactly how all this came down and wound up in a mound of sheer chaos, I stopped, stood up, looked at Calaif in the eye and asked, very calmly and deliberately … (so happy I started meditating in January)
“Calaif, have you ever taken a tent down before?”
“Ummmm, no,” he admitted innocently.
“Well, have you ever set up a tent before?” Even as the words were exiting my mouth, an answer was already swirling around in my head. Duh, he grew up in Brooklyn, and Harlem. How much camping do you really think he’s done?
I’m really glad my innocent, patient, sweet and curious little girl who is my Deep I, as ET* would call it, got the neurological first dibs on the vocal chords and airways.
“No. I never did.”
We both stood there and thought about the questions.
When I broke the silence with a boisterous roar of laughter, it was to say this.
“Calaif, clearly, there was a lesson here today for both of us.”
He listened attentively. He would always tell me stories while he’d sous chef for me in the kitchen, or wash dishes after I’d cooked, about how he was always getting in trouble as a kid, and always gettin’ a whoopin’. And, he admitted to me, he thought sometimes he deserved it. I told him I didn’t think any child deserved to get a whoopin’.
So just now, with tent poles in his hands, I think he was just waiting to see what I was going to say. Maybe just to test my resolve that no one deserves to get a whoopin’.
“Yes, two lessons. Clearly, if I see that someone is volunteering to help me out, I need to ask them, ‘have you ever done that task before’?”
He smiled.
“And then, the lesson for you is, that if someone asks you for help, or you offer to help, it will be really important to let them know that you haven’t done that thing before. And that you’d be happy to help out, with a little instruction and direction.”
We both busted out laughing. I was glad we could get through this without any whoopin’s. So to speak.
And just then, a new guest named James showed up. Calaif was so relieved. James was a black brother who grew up in Brooklyn, and they immediately exchanged knowledge of streets and shops and food. James saw what was happening and offered to help. By then we had a plan and had it under control. He and Calaif hit it off right away and started talking about sports.
Then James told me he’d thrown his extra tent in the trunk of his car, and if it helped, he’d take it out and set it up. I said, “OOOOOKay?”
And that’s what he did.
I asked him how he knew how to pitch a tent.
He said he set up it over and over in his living room, so his daughter could play in it. That made me laugh.
We got to drinking beer and preparing food.
A wind came up from the west, and picked up James’ tent and blew it over.
Turns out you don’t have to stake down a tent in a living room.
I gave James a couple of stakes and a hammer so he could stake down his tent, which he’d never done before.
It was an amazing holiday weekend. Lessons all around.
Just another holiday in America with #Nothing in Common.
*Eckhart Tolle
This is a series.
Time travel — you choose, backwards or forwards in time.
© Susan Brearley, 2019 All Rights Reserved
Susan Brearley is a published book author, writer, editor, essayist, occasional comedy writer, and an accidental poet. She is currently working on her second book, a murder mystery about an OCD detective, who’s been called a “young version of Monk”. She’s a retired systems engineer and salesperson from IBM, a serial entrepreneur, and a survivor of a stage 4 inflammatory breast cancer since 1995. She’s also working on her US Coast Guard Captain’s license, has her US Sailing keelboat certification, and is the creator and elder teacher of a new program, “VisionQuest” that mentors and teaches adults of all ages how to create the life they were born to live. She is currently based in the mid-Hudson Valley, New York.
