June 19 - How It Ends

The night before the clothes drying rack she'd ordered from the catalog was schedule to arrive, Janet was like a kid on Christmas Eve who'd already "accidentally" seen the pink bicycle she would be getting the next morning. All she had to do was fall asleep and then it would be hers the next morning.
And it arrived right on schedule the next morning, right after we'd finished our coffee. I put on some clothes drying rack assembling music (a live concert by Devotchka) while Janet tore into the box and went to work.
I don't know if you're familiar with Devotchka, but if you've seen Little Miss Sunshine you've heard their music. The opening scene of the movie is a sort of introduction to the characters set to Devotchka's How it Ends--the little girl imitating the beauty pageant contestant's face at the moment she finds out she has become Miss America; the boy marking off another day on the calendar that counts down the days before he can leave home; the father giving his motivation speech in front of what we soon see is a mostly empty auditorium. It's a heart-rending scene; we see these people at their most vulnerable and yearning moments, and it's hard not to come away with the feeling that they're all headed for disappointment. Such is the power of How it Ends, the achingly beautiful elegiac Devotchka song that's playing as the scene unfolds. Any other song and the scene wouldn't have been as poignant. And that was the song that was playing as we were unloading the box and realizing that we only had two bars when we should have had three, and so we wouldn't be able to finish putting the clothes drying rack together.
And I'm not saying Janet had all her life's hopes riding on getting that clothes drying rack, of course not, but it was still heartbreaking to watch as elation gave way to uncertainty and then to disappointment, especially as that song was playing. If we'd been listening to reggae or something else, it probably wouldn't have been such a big deal.
Janet kept looking at the picture in the catalog and comparing it to our collection of parts to see if we'd gotten something wrong, but we hadn't. We were missing a bar. Meanwhile, the woman in the catalog looked so happy and capable as she put her family's laundry on the rack for it to dry. That's what Janet had been looking forward to since she came to me all smiles last week and asked me what I thought about us getting a clothes drying rack. She wanted to be like the smiling woman in the picture: Hanging up laundry looked so easy and pleasant. I teased her about it a little bit before telling her I thought it was a good idea.
Every once in a while during the week I would look over at her while she was reading or something, and she'd smile suddenly, and I'd ask her if she was thinking about the rack again, and she would just laugh.
And now here it was a sunny Saturday, just aching for laundry to be hanging in its splendor, and our rack was missing a piece.
However, a minute or so later, that song ended and the next one was the much more upbeat You Only Love Me 'Cause I'm Leaving, and as we continued putting the rack together anyway, we realized that it would still work with two bars instead of three.
Later on, Janet called the company and the third bar will come next week.
So in the span of a few hours, we had anticipation, dashed hopes, a temporary solution, and the promise of a brighter tomorrow. Nothing of the life and death variety, but that was our story for today.
And this is how it ends.