Bedtime story

It all started when a single friend posted a picture of her new bed.

It was a beautiful new futon. But it occurred to me it wouldn’t occur to me to buy a futon. Well, not as my primary supine location. Bad back. Ouch. We do actually have a futon, though. We bought it when we first moved to Woodhaven and determined it would be nice to have a couch-like thing in our oversized office. This was before we had Wifi or even DSL and most of our computing was done in that one room upstairs.

As I looked at the picture of my 40-something friend’s new futon, I started pondering the evolution of bedroom furniture in one’s life. Or more specifically, my life.

The first bed I remember was my Big Girl Bed: a twin mattress with a woodenish head- and footboard. It was that French Provincial antique white with gold trim set that was all the rage back in the 1970s. I had that bedroom set until my first year in high school when I fancied myself too grown up for such kiddie furniture. So my dad and I (mostly Dad) built a very cool wooden box to encase my mattress now oh-so-hiply sitting on the floor of my bedroom, without that stuffy old-people metal frame. We painted the wooden box bright white and Dad made it about two feet longer than my bed so that, with a hand-made lid, I had a shelf at the foot of my bed for my clock radio PLUS storage underneath for favorite stuffed animals I was publicly too old for but privately couldn’t bear to part with.

That twin set followed me to college, after my freshman year sleeping on a college-issued twin in a college-issued room. The last summer before I graduated, I returned home and brought my bed and homemade frame with me. With only one quarter left before graduating, I decided less was more and returned to my college town in the fall with a queen-sized air mattress and some sort of mechanism for inflating it. I think it was called a vacuum cleaner.

I quite enjoyed the queen-sized-ness of my new bed, for it allowed me plenty of room to spread out books and papers while I studied. It also made me feel like a grown up, with options for sheets that went beyond cutesy flowers and cartoon characters. I remember feeling very sophisticated sitting on my queen bed, legally sipping a glass of very sweet white wine, studying some sort of upper division economics. I probably had an Al Jarreau CD playing softly in the background.

After graduating, I moved home to start my First Real Job Search. I brought the air mattress with me (how generous of me, since it belonged to my parents) and set up what I was determined to be a very temporary stay with Mom and Dad. Indeed, 7 months later, during one of Rob’s visits from way out of town, I was sitting on that air mattress putting on my Keds when Rob interrupted me with a very important question. I said “YES!!” and several months later, my air mattress was gone and I was in a new apartment with my new husband and his old queen-sized mattress and box spring. No metal frame again (we were just that hip…or that poor), no headboard, no footboard. Just a mattress and box spring sitting on the floor, with two pressed-board cubes from the hardware store serving as nightstands. And yes, we did indeed have a cinderblock bricks-and-boards bookshelf system in our living room. It was that time-honored decorating style called “Late College Meets Early Married.”

Three years later, after saving and shopping and discussing and compromising, we purchased our very first Real Furniture: a bedroom set. And with it, a new queen mattress and box spring. We didn’t have enough room for the matching nightstands so we opted for smaller and cheaper end tables from a somewhat coordinating living room set. Seventeen years later, the mattress has gone through several iterations but we still have the Queen Anne cherrywood frame with four posters topped by pineapples. It looks very grown up, what with the mattress hovering half a foot off the floor. Rob and I love the furniture but we are finding more and more – due to my back pain and a hotel-inspired appreciation for upgrades -- we might be evolving into our next phase of bedding: King Sized Sleep Number Bed.

There’s something about all that room that is so very appealing. Especially with two cats. And especially as I ponder the imminent readjusting of my internal thermometer to reportedly astronomical heights. Rob is delightfully warm and cozy by nature, but I know my day is coming when I will much prefer an iceberg sleeping next to me. I am thinking having some extra room and more “cool sections of sheet” might help quell some of those promised flashes of heat. I also love the idea of being able to adjust the firmness of my bed based on back's crankiness that night. Rob undoubtedly loves the idea of not having to sleep on a pillow-topped slab of cement.

And so, I also might soon have a picture of a new bed. A king one with sturdy furniture around it and a dial on each coordinating nightstand allowing for personalized numbering. Perhaps with reading glasses and prescription meds and a book of Sudoku puzzles, too. Oh, well, it could be worse. At least we aren’t Rob and Laura Petrie with matching twin beds.