The Tale of Two Tables

Yesterday my wife and I were helping her mother get ready for a rummage sale. Her mother had talked to her parish priest about borrowing a couple of old tables that the church would lend out to people. He was fine with that but was going to be gone so he said that he’d just leave the padlock open on the shed where they are kept and we could lock it up after we got them. The job of picking up the two tables was given to me and my brother-in-law so we took a truck over to the church. It seemed like such a simple task but we were soon to discover otherwise.

First problem we ran into was that the padlock was locked so we had no way to get in. Fortunately a couple of lady’s we new from when we grew up there were in the church decorating it so we explained our situation to them and asked if they new the combination to the padlock or where we could find it. They figured we would need to get it from one of the people who take care of the lawn since the shed was were the mower was kept. So we called the person who they thought might now it. He was sleeping but I talked to his wife and she said we really would need to get it from his sister but she didn’t have her phone number so she said we’d have to call her mom to get the phone number. I thanked her and called her mother and did my best to explain our situation as simply as possible. I would have probably been a bit suspicious had someone told me they were so and so’s son who’s mother-in-law had talked to the priest about getting some tables but the shed was locked so could she give me the number of the person who could give me the combination???....Just your typical phone call you know. Amazingly the lady totally trusted me and told me that she actually knew the combination and so she gave it to me. So I thanked her and went back to the shed with my brother-in-law full of hope that our mission was almost completed. But alas, the combination didn’t work.

We started trying similar combinations hoping that the lady just had one of the numbers wrong. Finally I tried swapping the first and last number and finally the lock opened. Now to load up the tables and be merrily on our way. As the light crept into the shed a feeling of despair came over our faces though as there were no tables to be seen. Someone else must have taken them and locked the shed up. We figured there wasn’t much we could do at this point but wanted to cover all of our bases so we checked some storage rooms in the church basement and upon not finding any were about to leave when one of the lady’s decorating the church ran into us again and asked if we got everything. When we explained our plight to her she mentioned to us that she thought her husband had a couple of old tables in his shed which we could borrow. Oh the joy’s of living in a small town. She called him up and told us he would meet us at his shed and directed us there.

Now this shed her husband had was no ordinary structure. I was expecting a little garage structure like the ones you can buy from a home improvement store but the reality was that his shed looked more like an airplane hanger then a small garage. It was literally filled with old tractors, engines, and every part and piece of equipment you could imagine. The guy who met us there backed out a gator and made some room for us to get inside. Sure enough, there were two tables that would finally complete our task. We loaded them in our truck thinking we were just about on our way but the guy asked us to come back as he wanted to show us something. He asked if we had ever heard of a hit and miss engine. “Sure, I’ve got one in that truck,” my brother-in-law said with a grin. Then the guy (who really was quite nice) started up a small engine he had on a cart and explained to us how it worked with two flywheels and didn’t need any sparkplugs. It was kind of a neat thing to see but it soon went from just looking at this engine to a full-blown tour and history lesson of every tractor in the shop. It was pretty cool when the guy turned on the lights and the whole shed lit up one light after another with some old-time 40’s sounding easy listening music starting up over our heads. Almost felt like we were in an old-time movie. It turned into a movie that could use some major editing though and after listening to a half dozen tractors run we told the guy that we’d love to stay there longer but that we really needed to be on way. He proceeds to show us one more and then finally we escaped.

When we got back to the house were the sale was going to be a good couple hours after we had left, my mother-in-law asked what had taken us so long and said we were in trouble. “You don’t know that half of it,” my brother-in-law said. Getting those two tables had turned into quite the adventure….and tomorrow we get to take them back.