IT'S CURTAINS FOR YOU!

            I had a sobering experience yesterday.

I visited a curtain store.

You’d never believe all the different types of curtains there are.  The question that kept coming to mind was:  WHY?

Hundreds of different styles, just to cover up a window?  Damn!  I don’t have a hundred different pieces of clothing!  Why should my window get this sort of special treatment?

And that’s what they’re called, by the way.  Window treatments.  It sounds like some sort of disease.  Does your window look depressed?  Suicidal?  Stall on cold days?  Well, give it a window treatment!

I wandered into this store, called (what else?) “It’s Curtains For You!”

After I lost my lunch in a nearby bush, I ventured inside.  A woman who, I’m sure, was about 112, tottered up to wait on me.

“Hello, dear,” she said to the wall.

“I’m over here,” I said.

“Oh, of course you are.  What can I do for you?”

“I need to replace a curtain in my kitchen.  The grease fire last night pretty much…”

“Oh, fine, fine,” she exclaimed.  “Right this way.”

She led me into a department called, “Kozy Kooking.”

Right after I lost my breakfast and last night’s dinner, I followed her in.

I want to tell you, I’ve never seen anything quite like it in my life.  There were 250 styles to choose from, and I’m the type to whom bacon and eggs or French toast seems like a monumental decision.

I looked around, but my superannuated guide through this diabetes-inducing fairyland had inexplicably disappeared.  I was left to my own devices.

I decided to approach my decision on a step-by-step basis.  First, I’d decide on a fabric.

Easy.  Cotton.

Okay.  Next, solid or pattern?

Pattern.  My kitchen is painted an eggshell color, so a pattern would be just the ticket to brighten it up a bit.

I looked at curtains with flowers, with fruit, with vegetables, with tiny cartoon bears, with cooking utensils, with dismembered animals (a design popular with the Goths in the area), with cats, with toilets, with trees, with aliens, with Monet’s water lilies, with Van Gogh’s sunflowers, with Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, with Edvard Munch’s Scream, with Da Vinci’s Last Supper (the idea must have come from eating at my house), with flying loaves of bread, and other things that I couldn’t begin to identify.

At last I found a nice maroon Navajo pattern that I really liked.  I decided on a pair of non-pleated curtains that would frame the window beautifully and look great against the paint.

And this only took three hours!

Then, as if by magic, the ancient crone reappeared.

“Having any luck, dear?” she asked a decorative pedestal.

“I’m over here,” I said.

“Oh, of course you are.  Have you decided, dear?”

“Yes, I think so.  I’d like the Navajo pattern, in maroon, no pleats.”

“My, what good taste you have!  That’s a marvelous choice.  Now you just wait right here while I go and get them for you.”

She wambled off.

Two hours later, she was back.

“Dear?” she asked a picture frame.

“I’m over here,” I sighed.

“Oh, of course you are.”

“Are we all set, then?”

“We’re all out of that pattern, dear.”

“What?”

“It’s a very popular pattern.  We’ll be getting more any month now.  I could call you when they arrive, if you’d like.”

I sincerely doubted that she’d live that long.

At any rate, my new curtains are the talk of the neighborhood.  You don’t see curtains patterned with serial killers just anywhere, you know!