Daughter and daughter-in-law bought me—with my credit card—a new bed for my boarding house apartment. Came with an IPhone-size remote control unit. This old man can now push a button to access an adjustable full motion motorized bed base with massage. Anti-snore, stress management and I can raise the mattress when I want to get up.
Mattress 3 speed massage function reminded me of my Dad’s many business locations: a yard for his oilfield trucks, warehouses to store drilling mud, a fenced-in location for pipe he bought and sold, an office downtown for his company that drilled gas wells and plugged some ‘dry’ holes.
Dad also enclosed a horse yard for the two Tennessee Walkers he gave to my mother. An oilwell driller gave him the horses in lieu of money for trucking services.
Motels were the final location where Red Elam consigned his coin-operated mattresses. A weary traveler could put a quarter in the box beside the bed and vibrate to sleep. Those mattresses ended up in one of his drilling-mud warehouses while Dad sought a buyer for his much-discounted mattresses.
When the oldest daughter discovered she had bought me a vibrating mattress, she laughed and recalled:
“I remember when PaPa was in the shaky mattress business.”
Photo by Dmitrii Pridannikoo at Shutterstock
