Zac Efron and The Booger Smearing Phase

Our 14-year-old Zac Efron look-alike son needed a bed.

"I need a new bed," he proclaimed, flipping his fabulous hair out of his eyes for the hundredth time that day. He seemed to suddenly need a lot of things ~ like $75.00 board shorts, a new Ipod and rides to the beach to surf.

I, on the other hand, often felt that I needed a lobotomy. Or a margarita. Oh, how our needs change...

The futon he had so convincingly begged for almost two years ago apparently was no longer meeting his needs, whatever those needs might be right now (I don't even want to know).

I suppose one reason for this would be that the futon was purchased during the time in his life he was still wiping boogers on various surfaces in the house. One of the most cruelly abused victims of the Booger Smearing Phase, aside from various bathroom walls, was the backside of his futon.

It took one visit to a mattress store for us to look elsewhere.

It's not that we didn't believe our son was worth the $800.00+ dent in our wallets a new mattress set would inflict. No...we just felt his needs could be met just as well by looking on Craigslist.

I know what you are thinking, because I thought the same thing.

EWWWWWWWWWWWWW.

You can NOT get much nastier than a used mattress; however, I challenge you to consider a scenario even more foul ~ that which goes on in a teenage boy's bed in the dark of the night. This could keep me awake at night if I chose to think about it too hard.

The Craigslist inquiry led us to a bustling, touristy beach town twelve miles south. The apocalyptic clouds that rolled in every summer afternoon had descended and the sheets of rain were falling at the alarming rate of at least 4" and hour. My husband had very wisely bought a tarp and rope to secure the mattress to the top of our SUV.

I dryly sat in the SUV, giving out a mental "woot woot" that it wasn't me out there tying a mattress to a car in the rain.

Nevertheless, I watched with *ahem* sympathy as the heavens unleashed their cruel, relentless tirade on my husband and my son, whose Zac Ephron-ish hair was now resembling a stringy, drowned rat that had met its end on the top of his head.

I didn't know which debacle to watch, as the choices were intriguing and plentiful. I subtly played electronic darts on the new IPhone as I watched five stunningly confused (and kind of cute) Norwegians students try to figure out how to get a broken garage door off a Jaguar.

The bed was one of the many items for sale by an aerospace student who was soon moving back to his home in Norway. One of the items was a sleek Jaguar SJ6 that my husband, wide eyed, considered for a short moment before I smacked him back into our reality ~ the one that doesn't include Jaguars.

Driving home in the impressive rainstorm that only the Florida sea breezes can produce, we pondered things that suck: pouring rain when one has a mattress on top of his car and a sweet luxury car that is almost sold when the garage door freakishly becomes unhinged and lands on the top of it, leaving it smashed, broken and sad.

As we drove our steady 35 miles per hour, our hazard lights on and our windshield wipers on full-blast, our eyes turned to the bicyclist on the shoulder of the road, peddling his little heart out as he was pelted with raindrops the size of dinner plates and the splashes of passing cars.

Yes, things could most definitely be worse.