Pillow Talk

Pillow Talk

All I needed was a new pillow. What’s the big deal about buying a pillow? It’s not that I haven’t bought pillows before, but it was always for my family and none of them are pillow picky. So I guess the real problem was me because I didn’t want just any pillow, I wanted a foam pillow. I never thought that it would be an adventure.

When I was a child I had a never ending cough which got worse when I slept. Back in the fifties if a kid had my symptoms their tonsils were removed as a matter of course. Coughing? Can’t breathe? Constant colds? Yank out those tonsils. I don’t think that anyone in Brooklyn kept them beyond the age of five. I don’t remember much of my early childhood, but like Bill Cosby I still have vivid memories of my tonsils’ demise. I remember all the kids crying at the doctor’s clinic. I even remember my mom trying to wake me up and take me home. And I definitely remember that first swallow and the subsequent painful ones that even ice-cream couldn’t cure.

Once my tonsils were out the doctor told my mom to buy me a foam pillow and I’ve slept on one ever since. A girl gets used to a certain kind of pillow after all those years. That’s why I found myself in the Bed, Bath and Beyond the Known Universe emporium.

I used to walk in, grab a pillow and walk out. But in today’s brave new world there is no such thing as plain latex. Now there is something called memory foam. It’s ironic that while my memory has gone to hell my pillow will be the elephant of the bedding world. Plus these pillows are so heavy that it takes two people to lift them and they come in every shape but a rectangle. They are square, they are round they are wedge shaped and the best one of all—they are wavy. I kept staring at that one trying to figure out where exactly I was supposed to put my head. On the bump? The valley? On both at once? And then I saw the price. It was basically a down payment on a car.

I realized that they no longer manufactured my beloved plain foam pillow and that there was no way that I could afford one of these memory monsters. So after fifty years of pillow loyalty I silently bade my old friend farewell and began searching for a replacement. Easier said than done.

Thank goodness most pillows still come in the usual rectangular size, although they seem to have expanded to queen, king and emperor size. But their innards are a whole different matter. Do I want duck, chicken, ostrich or goose feathers? A combination of sorts? Maybe I’d rather sleep on one of the synthetic blends, which simulate the finest feathers but are hypo-sanitary. After all you never know where that goose has been. I think my favorite one was the all-natural synthetic blend. I felt like Alice down the rabbit hole.

Once I had chosen my preferred innards I had to decide how firm I wanted my pillow to be. As firm as a handshake? As soft as mashed potatoes? As middling as Jello? Then firmness decided, it was on to a choice based on yet another set of criteria—the way I slept: on my side, back or stomach. What if I sleep on all my sides in one night? Do I have to buy three separate pillows for each position? Do I then stack them by the side of my bed so that when I switch from my back to my stomach I’m ready to throw one pillow overboard and grab the next? Do I do this all night? I see nothing but troubling questions ahead with this system like, when do I sleep? Does an all in one sleeping pillow no longer exist? Can I strangle the idiot who came up with these ludicrous “improvements”?

Pillows are just the tip of the ice berg. You can’t buy a simple anything anymore. Last month Lisa needed to replace her cell phone. The first question the salesman asked was,
“What do you use your phone for? Texting? Music? E-mail? When Lisa shook her head at each option he was shocked.
“Oh, you use it just to talk?”
I’m confused. Isn’t that what phones are for?

Steve tells me that he’s constantly amazed at what has become of the simple one blade razor. One day, thanks to an amazing scientific breakthrough, there were suddenly two blades. If the first one missed a hair the second would immediately destroy it. Through the years the ante has been upped to six blades per razor. Does any man have enough hair on his face for six blades? Or does he enjoy the sensation of six blades efficiently shredding his skin?

And what ever happened to knobs? You know the small round things that you turned so that electronic stuff turned on and off and the volume went up and down? I miss knobs. Look around, there is no longer a simple anything that simply turns on does its job and then turns off. Bells and whistles are now mandatory. Oh well, at least I found a pillow. And thank God it has no remote control and no memory—just feathers.