The following morning, Tuesday, February 21, Tom and I checked out of the Berlin Resort.
But first, as it was a nice, sunny morning, we took a stroll around the grounds,
Lehman's.
Tom looked around and sighed. "The place must have changed," he said.
Not that there wasn't any hardware to be found at Lehman's. No, there were a couple of aisles of tools and other work-related accouterments.
But it was the kitchen wares section that really pulled me in. There was such an amazing array of attractive, unique and useful things.
When she came to the egg beater she stopped. "You want this one?" she asked. "This is the expensive one."
"Oh?" said I, trying to remember whether or not I'd checked the price on the thing before tossing it into my cart. As I didn't know what the price was, I obviously hadn't.
"There's cheaper ones," the cashier added, "but this is the expensive one. Made in the U.S.A."
Now, I wondered how much an expensive egg beater, one made in the U.S.A., might cost. However much it cost, the cashier apparently took one look at me and figured I couldn't afford it. The figure that popped into my head was twenty five dollars. Maybe thirty. But no, surely not thirty. Twenty five. Or maybe twenty. Which I could certainly afford, no matter what this haughty cashier thought.
"Do you want this one?" she asked me again.
"Well, how much does it cost," I asked.
She held up the price tag.
So, with a little pang of regret I returned the egg beater of my dreams to its rack and tried out several cheaper ones, all of which admitted on their tags to being made in China, and none of which worked like my dream beater.
I'd finally settled on some decidedly inferior, but vastly cheaper model,
"Here, get this one," he said.
"What?...no!" said I.
"Aw, come on," he said. "Get it."
"Oh, no possible way," I said, returning the beater to its rack.
"Look," he said, reaching around me and taking it back off the rack, "I never buy you anything. You never buy yourself anything. You don't wear jewelry. You don't wear make-up. You don't wear clothes."
"Yes I do wear clothes," I said.
"You know what I mean." He again handed me the egg beater. "Please," he said, "take it. I want you to have it."
And so I took the egg beater from him, returned to the check-out counter, and made it my own.
And I've been greatly enjoying it,