the Birka Felony on the 21st Floor
This past weekend I moved my son into his new condo in Norfolk, where he is beginning his PhD pursuits. There are certain milestones in fatherhood nobody puts in the books. First steps. First day of school. Learning to drive. College graduation. And apparently, helping your adult son dispose of two enormous rugs while looking vaguely like you have recently committed a felony.
The rugs were my wife’s contribution to the new place. Two 10-by-12-foot rugs she had bought for his apartment. He didn’t like them. This is one of the advantages of being the child in these situations. You can say, “I don’t really like those,” and then wander off while your parents begin solving a problem involving roughly 240 square feet of unwanted carpeting.
The rugs needed to go to the basement. My son lives on the 21st floor.
We rolled the first one as tightly as two men without any actual rug-rolling expertise could manage, which turned out to be not particularly tight at all. What we eventually produced was a loosely bound, six-foot-long cylindrical object with the approximate dimensions of a human body. Then we got on the elevator.
By this point I had spent much of the day moving furniture. I was sweaty. My clothes looked slept in. I had not shaved in four days. So there I stood, unshaven and damp, holding a poorly wrapped human-sized bundle while riding an elevator to the basement. Had there been a casting director present looking for “Man Police Would Like to Speak With,” I would have been a strong candidate.
The elevator stopped a few floors down and a woman got on. She looked at me, then at the rug, then at my son. She turned and faced the doors with the very deliberate posture of someone who had suddenly remembered every true-crime podcast she had ever listened to. We descended another few floors. Ding. Another passenger. Same sequence. Me. Rug. Son. Doors. Nobody said anything.
The doors closed and I leaned slightly toward my son. Quietly enough to suggest I didn’t want anyone else to hear, but loudly enough to guarantee everyone did, I whispered, “Do you think they know?”
My son stared straight ahead. One woman became extremely interested in the floor numbers.
I waited a few floors before adding, “We should’ve used more tape.” My son was trying very hard not to laugh, which did absolutely nothing to improve the situation. Neither did my subsequent observation that perhaps the basement had been a bad idea.
Nobody ever actually moved away from us. That would have been rude. Instead, everyone maintained the peculiar social contract of elevator travel, standing politely beside the sweaty stranger and his body-shaped rug while presumably calculating how accurately they could describe me to a sketch artist.
Eventually we reached the basement. The doors opened, and my son and I wrestled our suspiciously proportioned bundle out. Nobody followed us. Nobody asked questions. Nobody offered to help. The doors closed behind us with what I thought was an unnecessary amount of urgency.
We deposited the rug, stood there for a moment, and looked at each other.
Then we headed back upstairs.
Because there were two rugs
