This Is As Good As It Gets

This Is As Good As It Gets
---- Big Frank Dickinson

"Squeeze out
all the segments
of this orange day
before it disappears
into the sunset."
---- Dennis O'Driscoll
1.
He had promised his girlfriend that when he was abroad that he would get her a present. This was something that weighed on him as he trudged through the various markets in these foreign lands that he was traveling through. There was no real reason for him being so abroad other than his wanting to put himself in a different place than the one that he was overly familiar with. He had this idea that traveling to unfamiliar countries alone was something that he needed to do. He wasn't sure why. He was not familiar with this country in the least. The language was so strange that the only words that he understood were the occassional "OK" - which he recognized, despite the fact that it was said with the first syllable stressed and asperated. It sounded like the kind of "OK" that the foreigners said in movies. It was said like this "HO-k. In fact, he somewhat felt like he was in a movie. A movie of a foreign land.

He found lots of stuff made out of wood. Wooden boxes, wooden plates, wooden coat racks, wooden balls, and wooden dolls. He decided to buy a wooden doll. He asked (well, he actually motioned) for the clerk to take down a big wooden doll. The foreigner said, "HO-k" and gave him the big doll. And then, much to his surprise, the clerk opened the doll and inside was another, and inside this yet another, and so on and so on. He decided that he should buy it: "This is as good as it gets" he said to himself.

2.
Why were there so many different kinds of mattresses? He was out shopping to get a new mattress. His old one had a very large valley in the middle of it. He could not sleep on either side without sliding into the middle of it. He had slept like this for a very long time, and it was not something that had much bothered him, or something that he had much thought about in any way whatsoever. However, he had met a girl; one thing led to another and they were now sleeping together. Sometimes he slept at her house. She had a very nice mattress. It seemed like it was high. Perhaps because his girlfriend not only had a mattress, but she had a boxspring on which the mattress was perched. And the mattress, his girlfriend had told him, had padding on the top. It also had springs and there was no valley in the middle of it. He liked being in the valley with her, but she said that he generated too much heat for them to be in the valley together. He could not regulate his temperature, so he was buying a new mattress.

The clerk told him that the word "mattress" came from the Arabic word for "throw" as in a mat or something like that is thrown on the floor. He immediatly starting thinking about that Japanese kind of mattress - the futon. He that that would be too low and told the clerk that. The clerk told him that this store didn't sell futons, it only sold mattresses. He then started to tell him what they did sell. Ron, the clerk, said they need to start with the size: twin, double, queen, California queen, king, California king, or super king? He told the clerk that he need one big enough for two, but that his bedroom wasn't' that big. They started looking at queens. Then Ron asked him about the mattress components: spring, foam, water, or composite? He said that he really didn't know, but he thought it should have springs so that there would be no sagging - no valleys. So Ron showed him some inner spring queen mattresses. Some had a little padding on top, and some a lot. Some had box springs and some not. Some were extraordinarily expensive - over $2,000.00 - and some were only a few hundred. It was a tough decision, but he chose one that was peach colored (there were many different colors and patterns), and cost about $600.00. He skipped the box spring. He said to Ron, "This is as good as it gets."

3.
He and his girlfriend had a fight. She had liked the doll he brought her, and she was happy with the mattress, but she did not like the fact that he sometimes talked to her about vague feelings of dissatisfaction. She would say, "What have you got to be dissatisfied about?" He wasn't sure what - he liked his job; he liked her; he enjoyed his weekend and evening activites (sometimes with her and sometimes with his friends), and he was optimistic that his life was going to get even better in time. However, sometimes he felt sad; and sometimes he felt more than sad - he felt depressed. However, he didn't know why he felt this way. She did not have these feelings - ever, and thought that maybe it might have something to do with her. He told her that it did not, that he really did not understand why he felt this way. It was not a common feeling, but when he felt it he was not fun to be around, and he also did not attempt to hide the fact that he was feeling down. She had talked to him about this many times, and it had always led to the same dead end. Sometimes she probed him about how exactly it felt. He told her it felt like a fire dying inside, like a premonition of a catastrophe, or like the knowledge that he had forgotten something that would have dire consequences. Sometimes she tried to give him advice and told him that he should just stop thinking about it, or he should go do something active, or . . . concentrate on all the good things he had going for him. Then she would sometimes get frustrated, because she loved him, and did not want him to feel sad or dissatisfied. He would tell her that he too did not want to feel this way. They couldn't solve his problem. Finally he told her that he was going to try to look on the bright side because he did have a lot to be grateful about. He told her: "This is as good as it gets."

4.
She saw him quite often, but did not live with him. She had her own house and she enjoyed her time alone. This was not time that she sought to escape from anyone - certainly not from him. It was time when she could be by herself. When she was by herself she sometimes kept herself quite busy. She liked to do a few crafts that had to do with pottery and also with collages. In fact, she was working on a new technique to incorporate collages into her pottery. The mixing of the glazes and then the selection of just the right temperature to create the impressions of a mixture of disparate scenes on the pots was a challenge that she hadn't completely solved. She also enjoyed the silence of her place and the beauty of her yard, which she had spent considerable time on. In the morning, her favorite time, she would rise with the sun and brew green tea (two minutes). Then she would take a sketch of the collage that she was working on creating for her next pot and she would take it to the table in her kitchen overlooking the garden. As she drank the tea, she sketched the scenes that she would need to create glazes for to fire on her recent pots. The silent creation led her to think: "This is as good as it gets."