After the heavy snow last weekend a friend and I went tobogganing at the golf course. My toboggan is a beautiful rock maple sled, its steam-bent nose arcing gracefully backwards toward the smooth boards of the base. It was built by our Canadian friends, those great toboggan makers. Lovely yellow plastic ropes snake down the sides, threaded through six cross pieces that reinforce the construction and provide stability to the toboggan. What turned out to be our last run of the day was a scream. Literally, we screamed our way down the hill. It was our fastest ride, our Gore-Tex clad butts absorbed the bumps until we got big air and somewhere near the bottom came down hard on the packed snow. The cross members holding that beautiful yellow rope are themselves one-inch square, two foot long blocks of that same Canadian wood that makes the toboggan so durable. We landed on those blocks. Our butts lost. The maple won. Sniveling in pain, we rolled onto the snow, skidded to a stop and looked at each other in wonder. Straggling home in disgrace, wounded in flesh and pride, my friend spat blood from the bites she'd taken from inside her mouth when her chin speared my shoulder. The heretofore cherished toboggan dragged ignobly behind us, unloved, as we limped to the car. We were disenchanted. I was mortified; it was my fault.
If only I'd bought the pad when I bought the toboggan. That's the punch line here. Spreading bruises caused by my penuriousness would pester us for days. There was no avoiding the pain, we couldn't protect our wounds unless we stood to eat, drive and sleep. Wrapping the site in pure white gauze to pad it and announce the presence of damaged flesh was out of the question, which also meant we'd get no sympathy for our injuries. And, you can't tell someone that you're limping because you were too cheap to spring for gaudy vinyl and cheap foam. If only I hadn't been so tight and had simply forked over the extra bucks for the festive green pad lying suggestively beside the toboggan that day.
I broke my personal rule, the one that says (should shout actually), "You get what you pay for." In this case, I got what felt like a crushed coccyx along with a lingering psychological abrasion from my disregard of that cardinal rule of consumerism. Those of you from the Midwest may hear a contradictory refrain when your parents say, usually after you've spent a significant portion of your summer savings on dinner for them in Boston where the ocean is right outside the restaurant, "You can get just as good a lobster from Red Lobster and it doesn't cost as much." Well, you can't. Remember the voice, "you get what you pay for."
Another rule to live by: if you like the skates or the jacket or the boomerang, buy two because they'll stop making them, or you won't find them again ever, or you'll want to give somebody a boomerang to impress them and you won't want to give yours away. This always happens, trust me. I'm paying the price for not heeding my own advice.
Every year, Leon Leonwood Bean--that is what the L.L. is for--has a factory sale in the great state of Maine, and two years ago there was an entire bin of fabric and leather boots replete with Gore-Tex booties for sale. They cost ten bucks a pair and there were scads of them in my size. What did I do? I bought one pair. Now those boots are coming apart and I can't take them back because Mr. Bean draws the line at returning broken stuff from the factory sale, and it'll cost me a hundred and fifty bucks to replace them. What was I thinking? I wasn't, obviously. Non-thinking was a condition I thought to be a dismal part of my past until I made that unfortunate decision to forgo the pad for my shiny new toboggan. I got a new pad yesterday. It's an even more festive red vinyl event purchased from a local hardware store. I wanted two of them, but they only had the one. I asked. I'm listening to that voice now, and all those other voices too.
