mattress mayhem

Many moons ago, when we lived in our little one-bedroom apartment in Georgia, my family came to visit over Easter weekend, and brought an air mattress with them. My sister slept on the couch and we inflated - manually - the balloon-bed on which Mom and Dad would sleep. And when I say "manually" I mean "orally". Yep. No vacuum inflaters back then. Not even a measly little foot pump. We huffed. And we puffed. And we huffed. And we puffed. And we blew that giant overpriced pool float right up. . . over the course of, say, two or three hours.

Later, while we were all sleeping peacefully in our respective beds, the apartment complex came under attack. In the wee hours of the morning we were startled awake by an explosion akin to a sonic boom or an 8.2 earthquake:

BOOM!!!!

It hit us so hard we literally screamed ourselves awake. "WHAT WAS THAT?! ARE YOU OKAY? ARE WE UNDER ATTACK? IS EVERYBODY ALIVE?" I ran the 5 steps from my bed to the living room to witness the following: the air mattress had exploded, Dad was lying FLAT on the floor, Mom was draped over him like the wreath on a winning racehorse, and the remaining air (and saliva) in the mattress was poofing out past their toes. Recalling this story still makes me laugh out loud.

I'd give anything to have an actual photograph of "Ground Zero" following this mattress-mayhem, but then again, the mental picture in my head is so worth these thousand words.