By Muriel Lilker
They’re taking over my life. Everything waits ‘til I read the catalogs. I don’t have time for cleaning or for marketing. The closest I get to cooking is ordering fabulous new pots, which I then just admire lovingly because I don’t have the time to use them.
I don’t skip a word. Page after page I pour through each and every offering, finding hardto-find items I wasn’t even looking for. Boots that would improve my horseback riding if I ever got within a mile of a horse. Office equipment if I only had an office. The offerings leap off the pages. Buy me! Buy me!.
And suddenly a headline jumps out at me — Same-Day Shipping.
Wow! That stunning new clamp-on desk lamp could be at my house the very next day. Of course then I’d have to figure out how to clamp it on. And to explain to my husband why we’re getting rid of the table lamp that brightens just fine even though it doesn’t clamp.
Note: Prepare to be disappointed. That silk robe that looked so dazzling on the model in the catalog may have lost something in the translation. Maybe because I don’t have an elegant chaise lounge, or a brilliant floor lamp.
Hold it! Where’s that catalog on furniture? Frantically I delve through piles of catalogs that are now obscuring the light from two windows. Is this it? At once I pull out the catalog with a couch that costs as much as our house did 20 years ago.
“What have you got on?” my husband asks, as he suddenly appears from behind another pile of catalogs.
“Hi, dear,” I say, “what do you think?” as I twirl around in the silk robe.
“I think you’re wearing our food budget for the next week,” he says.
He’s almost right, so I just tell him that dinner’s ready, and place before him some macaroni and cheese from a mix which doesn’t interfere too much with my reading catalogs.
But I have other problems.
Our mailman is becomingly increasingly stooped over with each new batch of catalogs. I’m afraid that offering him a glass of lemonade won’t cut it. The best I can do for him now is move to another neighborhood.
I have to beware of placing catalogs on the same table where they may cover library books I no longer have time to read, and which I’ve already forgotten I’ve borrowed.
I have to remember not to say to my family, “Gee, I don’t know what to get you for Christmas. Why don’t you look in one of those catalogs and show me what you’d like.” What they may like might seriously affect my standard of living for the next fiscal year.
Maybe I should kick the catalog habit. Or at least try.
Ooh, here comes the mailman. Maybe he’d like to see that catalog on orthopedic supports.
