A Typical Saga
Seriously, does anything normal ever happen to Robin Whetstone?
I wonder if normal things ever happen to Robin Whetstone. If they do, I hope normalcy visits her rarely, because one of the things I love most about her writing is that, knowing her as I do, I never once doubt that she is making anything. A friend once told me the secret of how journalists make fun of people — Write down what they say and put it in the paper. That’s how Robin entertains her readers. She writes down what happens to her and lets me publish it.
by Robin Whetstone
My tenant moved out unexpectedly after only living in the duplex for 5 months. Finding people, interviewing them, and showing the duplex during a pandemic was interesting in a bad way, but I found two nice young people who both work in the service industry. I felt good about renting to them.
On Sunday, I went to the duplex. The former tenant had left two days earlier after texting me that “all his stuff” would be out on Friday at 5. But when I went over there on Sunday, he had left behind a big reclining couch, a giant leather chaise lounge, a nice dining room table and chairs, and a 5lb box of Milkbones, for dogs.
“Crap,” I thought, “He said he was taking all his stuff. What am I going to do?” I don’t have a truck, there’s no one I can count on to help me, I can’t move all this stuff by myself, and, even if I could, where am I supposed to put it? The new tenants are coming in a couple of days. I have to get this stuff out of here, now.
With an unusual burst of energy, I suddenly decide “I am solving this problem RIGHT NOW.” I take pictures of all of the furniture and immediately post it on the Athens Mutual Aid FB group, which is a great group where neighbors help each other. “You can have this furniture for free if you will come get it now,” I say. This is really nice furniture – I’d keep it myself if I had room for it. I am immediately inundated with responses from people who are saying things like “I live in Commerce, 30 minutes away, but I am sending a friend to come get the couch.” And “This is a GODSEND, God bless you, my babies have been sleeping on the floor and they will finally have a soft place to lie.” And “My niece escaped an abusive relationship and is living in a place with no furniture. This is a real change in fortune for her, THANK YOU!!!!”
I am feeling so good about myself and the world. Never has a problem been solved with such dispatch, and with so many good outcomes for me and for other people. What could have been a bad situation has ended up being a boon for everyone. GO ME! I tell three separate excited families that I will leave the door to the duplex unlocked and they can come in anytime to get the furniture, then I take my kids and leave.
About 40 minutes later, I get a frantic text from the tenants who are about to move in. “Uh, ma’am, I’m sorry to tell you this, but we saw your post on FB about the free furniture. We actually paid the former tenant for that furniture and asked him to leave it there. He said he would tell you, but I guess he forgot. Is it too late? Have you given all of it away already? We are so sorry, ma’am.”
“We will be the most popular people at the dog park,” I tell the kids. “All the dogs will love us.”
“OH NO,” I think, dashing to the minivan and jumping in. I have had many tenants leave stuff behind when they move out – TV stands, refrigerators full of food, various carcasses – but never in all of my years of landlording have they left it behind because the new tenants paid them to do so. Once you move out, the stuff you leave behind becomes fair game unless you’ve made other arrangements and communicated about them. It’s the law of the jungle. I speed toward the duplex, imagining that when I get there I will see these three families toting out the furniture and will not only have to break their hearts, but maybe wrestle with some of them. This is terrible. When I get there, thank goodness!, no one has come yet. I quickly text all of the people I was trying to help out to tell them, psych, you can’t have the furniture after all, ha ha. I feel way more evil than I would have if I had been a person who just didn’t offer random people free furniture to begin with. The people are very sad, but no one seems mad. Phew. My sad thoughts about this are replaced with funny thoughts about how the new tenants felt when they happened upon the fact that their landlord is giving away all their furniture before they’ve even moved in. What a fun way to start things off.
“Oh well,” I tell the kids, “Since we’re here anyway, let’s do something fun.” We stuff all of our pockets (jeans, coats, sweaters) full of Milkbones and head off to the local dog park. “We will be the most popular people at the dog park,” I tell the kids. “All the dogs will love us.” This turns out to be truer than I reckoned. I should have known that if three people show up at a dog park with 5lbs of Milkbones hidden in their clothing, it’s not going to go well. And, indeed, all of the 12 dogs at the dog park, from Chihuahuas to Great Danes, immediately, wildly maul us. They knock us all to the ground and stand on us, pawing at our pants pockets and nosing around in our coats while their owners stand there screaming “He has special dietary needs!” and “Down, Bowie, down!”
We pick ourselves off the ground and walk toward the exit, brushing pine needles off our fronts. The dog owners are gathered together in an angry clump, watching us go. “Dog people are supposed to be friendly, but I don’t think they liked us,” says Merrill. “Their dogs did, though,” says Jack.
We go back to the duplex so that I can check to see if the paint for the living room is in the crawlspace, because in the next day or so I am going to have to paint it. I check in the crawlspace and then, as I’m walking back to the minivan, I notice a box on the former tenant’s stoop that was not there before. “What’s this?” we say, approaching it cautiously. Is it a bomb left by one of the needy families I so callously tricked? Nope, it’s one of those “meal delivery kits,” from Home Chef. Huh. I’ve researched these things before because it sounds like a great idea. Planning and shopping for meals for 5 people every single day of every single year started getting to me about 14 years ago. Wouldn’t it be great if someone just handed me some food and told me to cook it? But, the plans are expensive. And will my 3 kids like the food?
We steal the box with no thought at all to the fact that it doesn’t belong to us. Consider this a tax on furniture-leaving and dog-mauling, former tenant. Besides, if we don’t eat it, it’ll just go to waste. Couple this with the fact that, 2 hours ago, I started wondering whether boxed mac and cheese two nights in a row is a DFACS-level parenting fail. What the heck am I going to cook for dinner? Whatever is in this box.
We take the box home, and it is like a culinary Christmas. There’s meat in this box, lots of it, and fresh vegetables, little packets of complicated seasonings, and even a tube of honey. What kind of wonderful magic is this? The kids dance around the house, holding the packages of salmon and chicken above their heads and making joyful whooping noises, like they’re islanders who have just discovered the mysterious contents of a downed WWII plane. I fall into the dining room chair and sob over the fact that I have just been given a week’s worth of healthy, tasty food without having to think about it or even leave the house. I cook up some honey-mustard-crusted chicken breasts with southwestern corn on the side, and the kids eat every bite of it without complaint because “it came from the magic box.”
I don’t know how to square all of these events, karmicly. Was nearly having my whole family eaten by weimaraners a punishment for yanking free furniture out from under needy people? Was the free box of magical food a reward for the good I tried and failed to do? It’s mysterious, I tell you, and though this happened many months ago, I still haven’t figured it out. Today, the new tenants are comfortably settled on the furniture they paid for, we’re back to eating mac and cheese, and we haven’t yet been back to the dog park. Balance has been restored, for now.
Robin Whetstone is a Georgia-based writer who previously serialized her memoir about living in Moscow in the early ‘90s. As we’ve seen from her earlier contributions to The Experiment, she has a remarkable comic voice, but what makes her memoir unique how it retains that voice while describing the peril she finds herself in. You can find the first chapter here.
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