It was a moment fraught with tragedy and human pathos. After the fact, I realized it was also a moment reminding me that you’re never too old to do something stupid. Some backstory is needed.
Recently, we had the floor in the kitchen and my wife Carla’s office replaced. The old floor was wood and had water damage in front of the kitchen sink and across from Carla’s desk, the latter due to leaking pipes in the radiant heating system. We’d been meaning to have the floors replaced for a few years and finally got around to it. That required everything in the dining room and Carla’s office to be moved out; a process that started on Monday of the week with the floor crew to arrive bright and early on Thursday.
The heavy lifting came on Wednesday after lunch. Then, we cleared everything we could out of the dining room, leaving the rug and the hutch where all the dishes were kept for the crew to deal with. The last thing to go was my 36-bottle wine fridge. To do so, I had to take all the bottles out, get the dolly from the garage, and then gently move the fridge from the dining room into the living room next to the sofa. From there, plug it in and put all the bottles back. It seemed like a simple chore. But Fortuna had other plans.
Unloading and moving the unit was no problem. I plugged it in and was rewarded with the quiet humming sound of wine storage progress. Next, I nabbed two small bottles of dessert wine and three 500 ml bottles of single estate Tuscan olive oil that I kept on the very top rack of the fridge. Otherwise known as the place where regular wine bottles do not fit. I put all five small bottles on top of the fridge, opened the door, and went to kneel down on one knee so I could do the stocking. To do so, I put my left hand on top of the fridge and started to kneel down. And then things quickly went to hell.
Even though I wasn’t putting much weight on the fridge, the front of it tipped over precipitously towards me. Gravity immediately did its thing. I watched as all five bottles slid off the top of the fridge, falling on to the tile floor. Actually, in my addled mind, I saw all the bottles fall in slow motion just like the Sam Peckinpah movies when all the cowboys get shot. But instead of a rain of gunfire, there was a huge crash with glass flying everywhere and a strong odor of honey and molasses.
I reacted like any erstwhile adult male in a crisis situation by letting fly a stream of invectives at high volume. Carla appeared and took quick stock of the disaster scene. After registering my emotional state as somewhere between mad dog and he who should be avoided at all costs, she wisely returned to whatever she was doing. That left me to survey the damage and start cleanup on aisle nine.
Fortuna got a quick shout out above. Let’s give her another nod. In fact, we should give her a wicked noogie using a cheese grater. That’s because of her penchant for cruel irony in the form of the casualties. If you’re keeping score, the three bottles of olive oil were intact and undamaged. Average cost was $30 per bottle. However, both bottles of dessert wine shattered on the floor, as seen from the tragic photo above. The destroyed duo included a half-bottle of 2006 Alana Tokaji Essencia, a gift from a colleague. I was saving it for a special occasion. Like breaking it on the living room floor. The other wine was a half-bottle of 2001 von Buhl Forester Ungeheurer Auslese Goldkapsul that I’d hand-carried back from Germany in the spring of 2002. I’d taken it out of storage recently intending to share it with MS colleagues at an upcoming class. Instead, I decided to let the living and dining room floors taste it. Regardless, the approximate retail of the two bottles of vino was several hundred dollars.
As if breaking the two bottles wasn’t bad enough, my attempts to clean up the mess compounded the situation by a factor of 10 on the dumbass/dipshit scale. But I meant well, as the saying goes about the road to hell being paved with good intentions. I first got a big dustpan out of the garage and swept up all the big chunks of glass, quickly taking them through the kitchen and back out to the garbage bin in the garage. In the process, I unknowingly dripped treacle-sweet wine here and there the entire way. Then I grabbed a plastic bucket and a mop, returning to the scene of the crime to sop up all the brownish treacle-sweet wine, which surrounded the wine fridge. Once I had most of it up, I emptied the bucket and filled it with hot water and a generous splash of Fabuloso, the recent surface cleaner of choice. I mopped the immediate triage site but quickly found the drips of wine that went all the way through the kitchen and out the back hall into the garage. With more best intentions, I mopped those too.
From here, I’ll spare you the details. I’ll just tell you that I ended up making every surface I mopped remarkably sticky. Meaning my Oofos sandals went scritch-scritch at high volume any time I walked through the area, making me think of the Sponge Bob episode called Squeaky Boots. Over the course of the afternoon, I mopped the floor at least five more times, each time using fresh hot water and more Fabuloso, which turned out to be not-so-fabuloso in de-stickifying the crime scene.
At some point, Carla and returned home with Patrick. She quickly surveyed my work. Within seconds of stepping on to the dining room floor and doing some scritch-scritching herself, she looked at me and said, “how did you clean this up?”
I told her. She responded, “I wouldn’t have done that.”
“Oh for f**k’s sake,” I thought.
But it was too late. The damage had been compounded. The irony of ironies, though, was the fact that the floor guys were coming early the next morning. Within hours, the sticky floor would be torn up and stacked in the driveway. Which is exactly what happened, leaving only a memory of broken bottles of expensive sweet wine to share in the future, whenever the need to demonstrate the fallibility of mankind was called for.
In the end, it’s only first world castles burning. Things break now and then. Just not expensive-ass bottles of dessert wine. Otherwise, life will go on. And Fortuna will always be cruel.
FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA
FOR PICTURES FROM MY LATEST WINE TRIPS
