White. Glossy. Large… and completely invading my life.
Let me introduce you to Guido. Guido started his life as a tree: A tree that used to sit happily on a hillside. No pain. No worries. Only sunshine, light rains and cool breezes. He was a happy fellow at the time, but in life, things always change. Little did the world know that Guido would soon become the demon that possessed my entire reality…
It all started last night around 8:30pm. Laura, David, and Josh were almost home. So, I was cleaning my room…again. Rooms are a pain like that. I’m convinced they would always stay clean if we never lived in them. But we do. So they must be cleaned.
I love my room. It’s full of all my hand picked furniture from all over the country, and the world. A chest from an old friend of mine, a vanity from a family member in Colorado, curtains from a friend in Romania, and a daybed I made from the headboards my mom and sister used when they were little girls. I’m an antique nut, what can I say? There are only two drawbacks to my room. One, I’m kind of semi-locked in the basement. And two, it’s pretty much non-existent in the size category.
Anyway, back to the story. I’m cleaning my room, and out of no where, my mom and dad walk in carrying this….thing. It’s a thing alright. Looks like a giant refrigerator rejected from the 70’s. It’s in a giant cardboard box with a rhino on the front. And I’m thinking to myself, “What kind of box has a rhino on it?”
Regardless, my mother announces that my closet and under-the-bed space are too small to hold all of my clothes, so she’s going to bless me with this…thing…that someone thinks is a dresser. I protest. Strongly protest. My mother smiles and sets it in the smack dead middle of my room. I glare at the thing. It glares back. We do this for about five minutes. Then I name the thing. I name it Hugo Chavez. It reminds me a communist dictator with its bold white head completely shattering the aura of the rest of the room.
Then I decide Hugo Chavez is too powerful a name for such a miserly thing. I name it Guido instead. Guido the refrigerator dresser. My mom yells from another room, laughing, “You can take it college next year if you want, Heidi…”
Oh help my crazed mind. To make matters worse, I’ve now found the handles to this thing. They’re made of opaque white something. But I can’t really tell what it is. Probably plastic. No, definitely plastic.
Dilemma plagues me yet again. Where am I going to put this giant white refrigerator? I think about just leaving it where it is… and then decide I would be mentally damaged if I had to look at it everyday. The closet. Yes. That’s the next bright idea. By this time, my mom is back and giving me a speech about how starving children in some foreign country would be ecstatic to get a dresser. I very happily tell her she may give it to the children.
But no, Guido has been entrusted to me, she says. So… I must deal with Guido. I spend the next hour rearranging my room to make Guido’s new home, the closet, more easily accessible. Joy. I’m still trying to figure out, “Why Guido?”
“Why can’t I just buy my own dresser?” I ask my mom after all the rearranging.
“Because you have Guido, and he needs a home.” (She’s seriously enjoying this way too much. She’s like a kid with a million dollars at Disney World. I’m starting to wonder if she’s chosen Heidi torture as her new hobby. Like the way she signed me up for sweepstakes when I was out of the country…)
If you’ve ever read “The Jacket” by Gary Soto, you know what I feel like right about now. And that’s all I have to say about this situation. Thus continues my love-hate relationship with the refrigerator named Guido. The End.
P. S. I am secretly putting Guido up for adoption as of this moment. If you are lonely, he would be the perfect companion or addition to any family. He might even become a famous poet in the future and make you millions of dollars so you never have to work again. I am not worthy of his grandeur. Please save me from this great responsibility. Thank you.
