Waiting for Godot

               In  high school, we read the play “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett.  (Note:  I didn’t like it, no action at all and boring). Discussions raged (well, okay, they were forced by our teacher), but have raged throughout literary circles about this play and its deep meanings. Was it philosophical? Existential? Spiritual? Political? Psychological?  Even Beckett was vague, though I do remember reading once that he said something to the effect of “people like to make simple things complicated.”

               I remembered this all vividly when, about ten years ago, we remodeled our kitchen. We ordered all new appliances – a once-in-a-lifetime dream. The remodeling was done in about four weeks and we had everything but the stove. Let me digress to say that I don’t understand why it takes 4 to 6 weeks to move a stove from one state to another. Are they moving it via a horse and wagon?  But at any rate, two weeks after the remodeling was complete, the stove arrived. The wrong stove.

               We sent it back and waited another three weeks. (The store rushed it!). So for nine weeks we ate meals we cooked in the crock pot or microwave, waiting for our new stove. It finally arrived and when we went out with the installer to the garage to move it into the kitchen, we heard a lot of what appeared to be broken glass tinkling sounds. Sure enough, the oven door had been cracked and was broken to bits.

               Geez.  I recalled and identified with how bored and stupid the two main characters (Didi and Gogo) were in the play while they waited for a man who was never going to arrive. The store re-ordered the stove and we enjoyed another three weeks of soups and stews. I waited for that stove like I was giving birth, but it finally (finally!) arrived. Intact and the correct stove.

               It was a twelve-week wait, but that stove still works and I still like it.

               Why am I reminiscing about waiting for the stove? Because this year, the year of the pandemic, the year of finding new things to do, I have spent about that same time framing waiting. Waiting for blinds.

               We ordered new blinds for the windows in our family room. The old ones still work, but we’ve never really loved them and they are over 20 years old. So we masked up and went to the store and had them send a professional to measure the windows. That was August 6.

               We were told they would be cut in the store and ready in a “couple of days.” That should have been my first clue. On August 19, they told us they didn’t have enough of the right size and were getting two of the blinds from another store. Since these were “scheduled” to arrive on Labor Day, I presumed this store was in Antarctica and the blinds were being brought here by carrier penguins.

               They did arrive, a little after Labor Day. That was September 7.  On September 11, they called us and left a message to pick up our blinds. We called back, because when we ordered them and the installation, we had been told the installer would bring them. So we wanted to double check and sure enough the nice and, apparently incompetent, voice on the phone said, “no, no, the installer will bring them.”

               The installer company called and said they could work us in – in October. They were simply inundated!  Apparently, a lot of people were bored with their homes and ordering window treatments to be installed. I mean, it is a pandemic.

               So I waited another month, tracking the days on our mostly empty calendar until the installer came. He arrived yesterday.

               He did not have the blinds with him. He stated, very emphatically, that we were to pick up the blinds. It’s actually in the contract we signed. And we would have been happy –ecstatic, really, for an excuse to go somewhere – to pick up the blinds had the lady not told us he would.

               So anyway, we called and the manager actually delivered the blinds to us. In part, I’m sure to not lose our business, but at any rate, now, just a mere ten weeks after ordering them, we have the blinds in our house.

               No, no, not on the windows. I am sitting here now, waiting for the installer’s company to call to schedule us again. I’m sure they’ll work us in…sometime before Thanksgiving.

               Waiting for Godot was really not complicated at all. I’m sure Beckett must have ordered something to be delivered sometime in his life. He got an entire play out of his experience! We write what we know, right?