For the whole of the summer of 2007, I felt like I was swimming though syrup. I had a new baby, and that baby was Kai. He was…not easy. He still isn’t. I was navigating a new normal that was not going well for me. I was sluggish, tired. I probably had a little post-partum. It was also the summer of Jenny McCarthy and of her incredibly idiotic yet terrifying bullshit, so on top of all the regular things that were difficult, I became terribly afraid that Kai would end up with autism. (Ha. HAHAHAHA!)
Scott, meanwhile was having an entirely different summer, having started a medication that was making him almost dangerously productive. He had so many ideas! And so quickly! It was somewhat like living with a coke boar, an otherwise ordinary being rendered suddenly fast and unpredictable.
One of his ideas was around what to do with a funny little outdoor space in our condo. The space was small, shaded, entirely concrete, good for exactly nothing. You couldn’t sit out there. It looked like you might get attacked by mosquitos. We both agreed that we should treat it less like a deck and more like a diorama.
We also agreed that we could do some sort of Japanese rock garden out there, and I even bought a book about Japanese rock gardening at Borders, because that’s how you did things back then.
It was into this scenario that the Buddha came into our lives. There is a bead store (like a store that sells beads, which I feel I need to clarify because it's a weird business to be in) in our neighborhood that had a giant Buddha head in the window. We both liked it, and Scott went in to inquire whether it was for sale. It was. For $450.
We were horrified. Well, I was horrified, because that seemed like way too much to pay for a Buddha head. I mean. We’re not even Buddhists.
Bummer, I thought, and moved on with my life.
But Scott, once he had that vision, would not be deterred.
A few weeks later, I was at my parents’ place in Minnesota, and I got a call from Scott.
“I FOUND A PLACE THAT SELLS BUDDHAS AND THEY ARE AWESOME AND I’M BUYING ONE RIGHT NOW.”
In the summer of 2007, Scott spoke in all caps.
“Slow down,” I said. “I don’t know that this is a great idea.”
“IT’S THE GREATEST IDEA. MY PARENTS ALWAYS SAID IF YOU FIND ART YOU LIKE YOU SHOULD BUY IT, AND I LOVE IT! I’VE ALWAYS WANTED A STATUE LIKE THIS!”
This, of course, was the first time I’d ever heard that he’s always wanted a Buddha statue.
“How much is it?” I asked.
“IT’S ONLY FIFTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS! IT WEIGHS 800 POUNDS!”
“I feel like that’s a lot. Can we wait until I get home to discuss it?”
“I ALREADY BOUGHT IT!”
:::
The statue was being shipped from a seller in Colorado. Scott gave me a number to call and promptly lost all interest got busy at work and asked me to take care of it from there.
I dialed the number.
The woman on the other end gave me a date to expect the statue.
“Okay,” I said. “And they’ll carry it inside for us?” I asked.
“Oh, no ma’am,” she replied. “They will leave it in your driveway.”
“But I don’t have a driveway,” I protested.
“The sidewalk, then,” she countered.
“So, how am I going to get an 800 pound statue into my house?”
“800 pounds? The statue actually weighs 1,200 pounds. And you should hire movers.”
I reported all of this to Scott.
“I hadn’t thought about that,” he said.
:::
I called a moving company that had helped a neighbor move. They seemed like a good prospect since they had hoisted everything up to their unit from the roof, like maybe they'd be creative with ropes or whatever.
Glen, from Golden Eagle Moving and Storage picked up the phone and listened to me describe what we needed, which was for someone to move a 1200 pound Buddha statue from my sidewalk down into a garden-level outdoor space.
At first, there was silence. And then Glen laughed. Not a chuckle but a full-throated guffaw. He laughed so hard he started to cough.
“You’re gonna need a crane,” he said.
I reported all of this to Scott.
“I hadn’t thought about that,” he said.
Glen said that to do this job we needed to pay him $500. In cash.
I reported all of this to Scott.
“I hadn’t thought about that,” he said.
I told Scott that if he said that one more time I would murder him, and that he had to be home that day to deal with all of this, since it was all his big idea. He agreed to both of those things.
Glen gave me some instructions. I was to park my car in front of our building so that they could park the crane as close as possible. I was to hand over the cash before any work would take place. I was not to bother with permits, something about the fat cats at City Hall.
:::
Let me pause the narrative here and say that if this had been the end of the story, this would have been plenty. I can look back on that summer and still feel my anxiety, that of a new mother, a new me. I had always assumed that when I had kids I would still be the same person—me, just with a baby. But that wasn’t at all the case. My house was a mess. My body was a mess. I was a mess. Everything about me was different. And let's not forget that that baby was Kai, who is awesome but who is also an autistic person and a complicated child from day fucking one.
Scott had purchased the statue because he thought it was cool. Probably the old me would have thought that it was exciting. Glamorous, even. But there’s something about parenthood that turns your partner’s assets into liabilities. I didn’t not want it, but the Buddha made me incredibly anxious, a giant, permanent, expensive monolith that seemed to be moving so fast toward me, during a summer where I was so slow. That this statue kept changing in scope and size, that we kept having these weird conversations about it, all of that would have would have been enough.
And then…
:::
The day the statue arrived, I had my car parked outside of our building, per Glen’s instructions.
Scott was home from work, and when the truck pulled up, we both went out to see what was inside.
The truck driver opened the back of truck and there it was. One lone crate in the middle of a cavernous space, like something out of an Indiana Jones movie. The driver was attempting to get the statue onto a dolly.
I let him know that the movers would be here any minute to help, and I went inside, leaving Scott out there to wait.
I hadn’t been inside very long when it happened, the almighty crash, of crunching metal and shattering glass, of splitting wood and thump of stone on concrete.
I ran to the window to see Scott, his mouth in a rictus of horror, his hands on his head in shock and disbelief, the truck driver standing in his empty truck, the statue on the street, pieces of the smashed crate littered all around it.
The driver had gotten the statue onto his dolly and wheeled it to the edge, but the crate was not stable, no doubt due to the sheer weight of the Buddha. Scott watched in dawning horror as the whole crate leaned dangerously off of the platform and, in the slow-motion nature of such things, fell. It landed first on my car—still right there saving a space for the crane—and then crashed into the street.
The aftermath.
The damage.
:::
I ran outside. A car drove by, slowing down to take in the carnage, like that scene from Fargo that leads to the snowy car chase. Whoever it was circled the block to get another look.
It was then that I saw the crane coming up the street. It pulled up to us and four guys got out. They were all about 60, wearing track suits. They looked like they had just come from filming an episode of the Sopranos.
Glen, who I recognized by his voice, without missing a beat or bothering to introduce himself to anyone started yelling at the truck driver in a thick over-by-dere Chicago accident.
“What the hell did you do? Why didn’t you wait for us? You knew we were coming!”
That's Glen In the yellow shirt. My memory made up the tracksuits, apparently.
Glen, in his tracksuit yellow t-shirt with his white hair and thick, muscular arms was still dressing down the truck driver as his guys made fast work of righting the Buddha statue, clearing away the crate, and deploying the supports for the crane.
Righting the statue.
Lift.
The crane.
Landed.
I went back inside to get Glen's $500.
:::
For insurance purposes, I had to go with the truck driver to the police station to file a report. He drove me in his truck.
“This is a little awkward,” I said to him. “Are you going to get in trouble with your job?”
“Ah, it’s okay,” he said brightly. “We get three accidents a year before we get reprimanded.”
I couldn’t think of what to say to that.
At the police station, we stood at the counter and asked to file a report.
“What happened?” asked the officer.
“A Buddha statue fell on my car,” I replied.
He looked up at me.
“What?” He asked.
:::
That night, Scott and I were supposed to have an appointment with our (wait for it....) marriage counselor. However, our then-only car had had a Buddha land on it and since been towed away, so we had no way to get there. I called to cancel. We still had a babysitter coming, though, so we left Kai with her and went out for a beer.
That evening is still crystal clear in my memory despite the fact that it was 13 years ago—the warm summer night, sitting on a patio sipping beer, Pabst for Scott and a Heineken for me. We stared into space.
“I can’t believe that happened,” Scott eventually said.
“We’re lucky no one got hurt,” I observed.
We spent the evening saying variations on those two sentences, alternatively laughing and staring into space. It was a lovely time. And probably way more productive than what we’d had planned, which was to have the same unresolved argument we’d already had a hundred times, only this time in a doctor’s office.
And looking back it was pretty good practice for all the times a statue smashed my car and crashed into the street, which happened only once in a literal sense, but over and over and over in a metaphorical one.
The metaphor in question on that day all those years ago. At least he's adorable.
:::
Six years later, I made a call.
“Golden Eagle Moving and Storage, Glen speaking.”
“Hey, Glen! It’s Megan Judy!”
“Megan Judy, Megan Judy. Why do I remember that name?”
“We’ve hired you before. Remember the Buddha statue?”
Glen started laughing, a full-throated scratchy laugh, in which you could hear every cigarette he'd ever smoked. He laughed until he started to cough. He took a long time to recover himself.
“We’re moving,” I said finally.
“Oh,” Glen said soberly. “Oh, no.”
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