Pour Me A Story, Vol. 49
feat. road trips (really this time), never taking your couch for granted, and more
greetings friends, and welcome to the pre-milestone 49th edition of Pour Me A Story.
since we last spoke, I’ve gained like 40lb due to the sheer volume of fantastic meals-between-bread I consumed in the City of Brotherly Love. I even overlooked my intense dislike for waiting in lines for things and waited for more than an hour for cheesesteaks from Dalessandro’s in Roxborough, and was not disappointed. Hot tip: the buffalo chicken cheesesteak is a life-changer.
anyway it’s just you and me this week as I try to scramble some stuff together for the big 5-0, so let’s get after it.
Living Rooms Are For Livin’, Man
back in late June, before we left Denver, we had a 20-foot box truck lined up to bring our belongings to Cincinnati and a crew of movers to fill it. when the movers arrived, we had an executive decision to make: do we bring our well-loved couches with us, potentially sacrificing valuable space in the truck? or do we cut bait, leave them behind and furnish our new place with a new couch when we get to Ohio?
ultimately we decided to leave the couches behind, and it was probably just as well because that truck ended up being very, very full. of course, that decision rendered our living room fairly empty when we unloaded the truck at our destination, and we set about touring the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky region’s furniture warehouses in search of our next couch.
unfortunately we ran into the same problem everywhere: nobody had anything in stock, they wouldn’t sell floor models, and we were unlikely to get a couch delivered before August due to the nationwide lumber shortage (and the alleged nationwide “worker shortage,” which just means “companies won’t pay people a worthwhile wage to do in-person work during month 20 of a pandemic.”)
the longer we searched, the longer the wait time stretched. frustrated but knowing we had to pull the trigger, we did just that on a sectional couch from a furniture store I’ll refer to very subtly as East Oak. we made the requisite color, fabric and size choices, consigned ourselves to an October delivery date, and that was that. all we had to do then was wait three months.
in the meantime we tried a couple of living room options, from a very shitty fold-out thing from Walmart to a passable loveseat from a local consignment store that makes a very ominous creak when I lower my hefty frame onto it and was too small for the both of us to sit on comfortably. when 7:31 rolls around and the baby goes to sleep, we’ve been retiring to bed to watch TV, read or wind down because the living room was simply not set up
the delivery window finally rolled around…and no couch. we called and inquired, and we were told that construction hadn’t even begun in the three months we’d already waited, again due to the alleged “labor shortage.” customer service wasn’t able to even give us a new timeframe for delivery, meaning we could be waiting until the spring of 2022 before we could comfortably sit in our living room and watch a movie. that shit’s DEPRESSING. we made moves to cancel the order before they could start spinning the fabric out of gold or whatever was taking so long.
Alex, meanwhile, took matters into her own hands. when she and her mom made a Costco trip two weekends ago, she found a couch that potentially fit the very specific space we had to fill. at home armed with the tape measure, I was skeptical that we had room, but…fuck it. if it’s an inch longer, it’s still better than what we have, right?
and so our scheduled Tuesday delivery rolled around, and we watched anxiously as the delivery crew unpacked the two pieces of the sectional, brought it upstairs, set it up…and it fit like a glove, not to mention it turned out to be perfectly comfortable and big enough to nap on.
the whole ordeal has really taught us a couple of lessons: namely, never take for granted how much easier it is to have a couch to sink into at the end of a long day of work or parenting. oh, and always bring the old one with you when you move, just in case.
Eastbound on I-76
I think last week I had every intention of waxing poetic about road trips, even going so far as to foreshadow it in the inbox preview line. upon looking back, I…didn’t actually do that? what an idiot. you truly get what you pay for here!
anyway, if you’d told me eight or nine years ago that I would willingly drive for 20-plus over two days for recreation purposes. in fact, before Memorial Day in 2013, my first summer as a U.S. permanent resident, I was grimacing at the idea of driving 100 miles to Bar Harbor for the weekend. since then I’ve driven from Maine to New Orleans then back to South Florida (2015), 1,200 miles around New England and northeastern Canada (2019), to Cincinnati and back for Christmas last year and, of course, in a one-way journey this summer.
but the world is different now, both in the public health and the parenting sense. taking an out-of-town vacation requires sensible packing so that we can have the kiddo sleep in relative safety and comfort, which necessitates not only plenty of luggage but a pack-and-play crib and a carseat, neither of which we can be sure will be easily accessible at our destination. on top of that, dealing with TSA is stressful enough as a solo traveler let alone with a stroller and a little one who doesn’t know what’s going on, so driving starts to look much more favorable.
on top of some conveniences and economic upsides (have you seen how much rental car costs post-pandemic? MAN), it’s also just a great way to see and understand parts of this vast country I may never have seen otherwise. it’s easy to forget when you live in a big city — or even a smaller city! — that there’s a whole lot of America out there, in small towns off the interstate and alongside state routes and in rest stops. I’d never seen any of West Virginia or western Pennsylvania, or central Pennsylvania for that matter, and even at 70 miles per hour it was still interesting to watch fly by.
at the other end of the road trip, in Philadelphia itself, I was reacquainted with east coast roadways: tight parking spaces in old, dense cities and the delicate dance of highway traffic. and I was as surprised as anyone to find I adjusted quickly, despite coming from an environment where people “couldn’t drive a greasy stick up a pig’s arse,” to borrow a poetic expression from my old man. I got honked at more often driving to pick up dinner when we got home Monday night than I did for the entirety of our vacation, which tells me a lot about Ohio drivers as compared to their Philly counterparts.
Worthy Consumables
I foreshadowed this last week, but I was really excited to visit my friend and one-time newsletter guest Eric Fink’s family hoagie shop on Princeton Ave. in Tacony, a neighborhood in northeast Philly. I’ve been rocking Fink’s T-shirts for three years and pleading with Eric to pack some sandwiches in dry ice and send them to me, but understandably he has better things to do.
after spending Friday morning at the really cool Please Touch Museum, watching the kid run around exploring all kinds of different environments, we hit I-95 North towards Tacony so we could pick up lunch. it was a half-hour drive from the museum and 40 minutes back, so I already felt as though I was pushing my luck with the rest of the family, but I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I’d gone all that way and not had Fink’s.
Eric was out doing deliveries when I got there but I received the royal reception from his dad, Dennis (literally, the man wore a crown) and was practically drooling as I carried the bag of food and merch back to the car. when we got back to the Airbnb and put the baby down for her nap, we tore into the huge paper sack to find not only the two hoagies we ordered, but a bonus third sandwich with “F.G.” scrawled on top.
it took me a moment or two to work out what was going on, but it dawned on me: this is the mythical Finksgiving, a hoagie with turkey, gravy, stuffing and cranberry dressing that appears only seasonally on the menu. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of turkey (I’ve been bringing ribs to Thanksgiving for the past three years) but the sandwich was an absolute knockout. I housed my half and Alex put away hers in similar fashion.
everything we ordered was out of this world. I ordered the Tacony for myself (rare roast beef, crumbled sharp provolone, balsamic-marinated asparagus) while Alex chose the OG Italian, which had everything you could imagine. I’d been looking at the Fink’s menu since 2018 and it was everything I’d been hoping for. this is also not a paid ad, the hoagies are just that damn good.
so if you’re in Philly, you either know what I’m talking about or you’ve been meaning to hit Fink’s and try it out. please feel free to rely on my ringing endorsement (and get there before the Finksgiving disappears).
Parting Note
ah I hate this part. I’m never any good at it. but I’ve had M*A*S*H on in the background as I sit (on the couch!) writing this, and I figured the theme song from the movie was as good as anything.
fun fact: the title of the song, Suicide is Painless, really implies it’s a heavy track. but according to reporting done by a book called Uncle John's Canoramic Bathroom Reader, the lyrics were written in five minutes by composer Johnny Mandel’s 14-year-old son, who was tasked with writing “the stupidest song ever written.” maybe you had to be there in the 70s when it was first performed, because they don’t strike me as particularly absurd, but the song turned out to be an iconic title track.
thanks for hanging, pals. I might take the post-Turkey Day edition off, so I hope you all have a happy Thanksgiving if you celebrate. until next time!
— adrian ✌🏻