211221 Sentinel, Christmas 1985

We had a great Christmas in 1985

We had the best Christmas party we ever had that year, with family and friends from Joyce's work and my work. We had a big beautiful home and it was packed with people.

In 1985, Annie decided she wanted a weight lifting set for Christmas. Joyce and I went to Sears to buy one. We told the clerk what we wanted and this nice young man rang up the sale and offered to help us by loading it into our car. We were all of forty at the time, but we must have seemed very old and feeble to him. He placed the weight set into a cart and pushed it out to our car. He lifted it into our trunk as easy as you please.

We drove home and surprise, Annie was at home on a Saturday afternoon! That rarely ever happened. We had to leave it in the trunk, waiting for her to leave that night. She did not leave the house. We waited patiently until late that night when we thought she was fast asleep. The two of us slipped out of the house and into the garage to sneak the set into the house and into our bedroom closet.

The young man from Sears had lifted and placed the set into the trunk like it was a feather pillow, but both of us struggled to lift it from the depths of that same trunk. We each held an end of the large box as we shuffled it back to the house. The noise of the mall just before Christmas and out in the parking lot masked the sounds of bars and weights clanking against one another. In the still of that December night, it sounded like a garbage truck backing up a steep grade. We managed to get the set into the house and then stuffed it into our bedroom closet.

Christmas Eve we wrestled it out of the closet and into the living room by the tree. We rose early Christmas morning and sat drinking our coffee, waiting for Annie to rise. She finally came down the stairs to join us and immediately noticed the elephant in the room. Joyce asked her if she was surprised. Annie replied she was not as she had heard us struggling the previous Saturday night when we trucked the weight set into the house.
“Well why didn’t you give us a hand?” I asked. “I didn’t want to ruin your surprise;” she replied. I suppose it was an act of kindness for us old folks. Bill