Going thump

Brian Wilson

Sunday was supposed to be my lazy day.

My wife, Kim, had a fair board meeting for the upcoming Demolition Derby event. My son, Alex, was lurking somewhere around the house avoiding the task of cleaning his room.

I was sitting in the sunshine in my backyard reading a book. With a break in the weather from the stifling heat of most of the summer, it was actually enjoyable to sit outside without sweating or swatting handfuls of biting bugs.

It was at that moment that I heard a loud thump.

As a parent, my initial reaction was to pause and wait for the sound of someone yelling in pain. When no sound followed, I went inside to check and see what it could be.

I quickly found Alex with headphones on simultaneously watching a Youtube video and playing a computer game. He had not heard any thump, which considering how loudly I had to yell to get his attention shouldn’t have surprised me much.

I did a walk through of my house, checking to see that the sump pump didn’t die in a spectacular manner or that the TV didn’t jump off the wall in protest to the quality of programming my son has inflicted on it over the past few months.

Satisfied that it was neither of those things, I went back outside to enjoy my book, thinking that perhaps the thump I heard was carried over from the nearby industrial park and was someone carelessly dropping a load from a forklift.

A short while later my wife came home and went into our room to change clothes. Within seconds she yelled out to me asking when all the shelves in our closet had collapsed.

One of the features that attracted us to our home was the size of the closets. When we were first moving in a decade ago, my son thought that his closet was his bedroom. We like to mention this when he has friends over or any other time we wish to embarrass him.

My wife had been busy the day before going through the plastic tubs that had found their way into our closet, attempting to purge it of things we no longer wanted or needed. She claims innocence from having had any direct influence over the shelving collapse.

Regardless of the cause, I was left surveying a scene of carnage as clothes, boxes and tubs were tumbled together and the remains of the wire shelving were hanging from their braces after the plastic doohickies holding them to the wall snapped.

This was clearly the source of the loud thump.

Solving the mystery of the noise’s origin was less satisfying knowing that it would ruin my plans to wallow in the sunshine.

I spent the remainder of the day running to local hardware stores to pick up new shelving braces, closet rods and long screws to anchor them into the wall studs. Kim and I then emptied the closet of all the fallen clothes and boxes and got to work installing the new equipment — a project that quickly found me covered in sawdust and sweat.

It was only many hours later after the last of the clothes had been sorted and rehung, that I was finally able to crack open an ice cold beverage and put my feet up for the day.

So much for taking a day of rest. *** With the presidential election getting into high gear, the number of Vox Pop submissions is increasing.

While The Star News welcomes letters on topics of interest to our readers and the communities of Taylor County, there are some limits to what we will run.

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Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.