1980 THE WATERBED OR DEAD ELEPHANT STORY

This story is about settling into Canada after two years away and watching Bubbaloo adapt to the new country, a new baby and life away from her family. We located ourselves in a small two bedroom apartment while I looked for our next overseas assignment. I took an interim job in Edmonton, but knew that we would be travelling again as soon as I could find work overseas. The first few months were still winter months and Bubba kept busy by making daily excursions across the street and into a mall.

She could spend hours walking the shops, pushing her stroller and dreaming of all the things she could buy. Even at this time the ratio of window shopping to buying was about 99 to 1. She would look forever before buying anything, no matter how small. Me on the other hand knew what I wanted, went to where it was sold, purchased it and exited. In any event, summer came along and we had made some purchases for our place and were starting to get nicely settled in.

One of these early buys was a waterbed. These had just become popular with the “in” crowd, so we had to have one. Well we got it home, I assembled the frame, wrestled this big grey bladder into place on the frame. I then read the instructions on how to fill it. Armed with this knowledge. I ran a garden hose, that was attached to our building just under our second floor apartment, and connected it thru the bedroom window and into the waterbed. Turn it on and let’s go! Well I watched it for about 15 minutes and it had filled up maybe 1% of where it needed to go.

Being bored we decided to go across the street to the mall for a little shop, some lunch and some looking around. Well we did and the afternoon passed nicely. A few hours in I told Bubba that we had better get home and see if her bed was still filling. Yup you guessed it! I walked into that room and saw what I thought was an elephant laying on its side, dead. This great huge, grey monster was dead in our room where our bed should have been. I fly out of the room and downstairs to shut off the hose. Just in time I might say.

If I had of been much later we would have had “the great flood” in that building. In these days there were no Baffles in waterbeds so you basically had a 250 gallon water balloon. I then had to siphon the water out of the bladder to get it back down to the correct size. A few hours later we had a bed. A few hours after that it was warm enough to sleep on. Success.

As a footnote to our waterbed experience I am also reminded that Bubbaloo never really got the concept of a huge bag of water. I used to be nicely asleep, she didn’t come to bed until the sun was down, sometimes after 11:00pm. She would then get ready, stand by the bed and then pounce onto it in a full belly flop or back flop entrance. She would hit the water, I would be flung up into the air as if off a trampoline. And many, many times I awoke with a death grip on the bed frame and asking “what happen, what happen”? It would take minutes for the waves to subside.

One of her other favourite things to do was to start cleaning the house while there was still light. I’m not talking about 3:00pm, I’m talking about 11:00pm. I worked early and mostly had a bedtime before 9:00pm. I would be nicely into the deepest part of my sleep when she would start the vacuum by my ear. Geezus it sounded like a jet was landing in our bedroom. I would wake up with a start and go “wha, wha, what’s happening am I late for work?” Realization would hit and I would lay there afraid to close my eyes. Who knew what she might get up to next? The cold, cold winter, short days, long summer nights, and malls were things that were all new to Bubbaloo. Things that she had to get used to. It provided me with some hilarious times!