The smell emanating from the guest bedroom, I will admit, was pungent and awful. For two days my mother and father searched high and low in the bedroom to discover what was causing the smell, but to no avail; they were not successful. I offered to aid in the reconnaissance mission with the expectation that my parents would dismiss the idea, but to my surprise they were very welcoming. I found it comical that my father was dumbstruck with his inability to solve this mystery. I never pass on an opportunity to “poke the bear” when he is a little disheveled. I started by asking a series of very obvious questions in an effort to denigrate his intelligence. I fired off the questions in rapid speed, as I knew he was going to catch on to my tactic and quickly put an end to it. As expected, he became irritated about 90 seconds into my questioning and asked if I could end the questions and solely direct my attention to identifying the cause of horrible smell. My father was trying everything he could think of to remove the smell. He searched in every spot of the room, washed the floors, washed extra clothes in the closet. All his efforts were unsuccessful. I tried some creative thinking by calling the dogs to solicit their assistance, but the smell was so bad they took a pass at this exercise. Making little progress I became bored and decided my time would be better spent jumping on the guest bedroom bed then continuing to this search. I jumped up once and landed to an odd sound that caught my dad’s attention. The sound was so strange that it stopped my dad from lecturing me on not jumping on the bed. My father said, “Jump up and down again.” I thought, “What, was this a trap?” To verify it was not a trap, I said, “You are telling me to jump up and down, and if I do, I won’t get in trouble, right?” He nodded. Then as instructed I jumped into the air and landed back on the bed. The odd sound echoed again. I did not think this could happen, but the smell in the room started to become worse after each jump. I was not the only person to notice that there was a correlation between the odd noise and the increased intensity of the smell. My father instructed me to get off the bed as he was going to take the entire bed apart.
What we discovered next was not a pot of gold. My father lifted the mattress and there we discovered the root cause of the horrible smell. A package of ground turkey had been stuffed between the mattress and the box spring and its packaging had been punctured in the process. The odd sound we were hearing was the packing breaking further, which exposed more of the smell. When my father lifted the mattress the smell released somehow was ten times worse. I gagged from the smell. Then my father told me to get out of the room to get away from the smell. As I made my move toward the door, my dad went over to the mattress, which he had been placed against the wall and took a whiff of the mattress to see how much of the retched smell been absorbed in the mattress. My father choose a poor time to make that determination given he was struggling to breath the tainted air even beforehand.
To my surprise the toxic smell on the mattress was too powerful even for him with his extensive experience changing diapers and the countless times he has been thrown-up on. Instantly, after putting his nose near the mattress, he violently gagged, then turned and ran with his hands covering this mouth toward the bathroom. He could not control his stomach and vomited in the toilet. When he finished, he turned and looked at me from the bathroom door. I could see that father’s eyes were watery. “Dad, are you crying?”, I asked. “No I am not crying,” he replied. “It’s OK to cry Dad,” I said. “Got it, but I am not crying for the record,” he responded. I recommended that we take a picture on my father’s phone so that I could provide validation that he was crying and have the picture to memorialize this event to show others in case anyone didn’t believe me. My father quickly deflected by inquiring where my little brother was. My father immediately jumped to the conclusion that my little brother was the culprit. His theory was pretty sound in my eyes. When we came home from the grocery store a few days ago my mom and dad had thought the grocery clerk had inadvertently forgotten to place the ground turkey in the bag. Turns out, the ground turkey was placed in the bag but my little brother snagged it from the grocery bag before anyone noticed and stuffed the package of ground turkey in between the guest bedroom mattress and box spring. I was fairly confident that even if we asked him why he did it you were not going to get a great answer.
When my father finally found my brother he sat down with him in the living room. I was excited to watch the show. Surely my father was going to go nuclear on him; I was certain it was going to be epic. I waited for my dad to huff and puff and chastise my brother for his poor decision making, but it never happened. My dad was calm and collected and in a nice and even tone explained what my little brother had done was wrong. The lack of action was truly shocking; I was in pure disbelief coupled with confusion and frustration. Overcome with emotions, I decided to chime into the conversation, saying, “Come on, he is seriously not getting in any trouble Dad?” Normally my father would have chided me for weighing in on the conversation, but he realized he needed to provide some prospective to his decision making process to me, as the absence of disciple was an anomaly. He went on to explain, unconvincingly, that my little brother was in phase of exploring. He was just beginning to understand right and wrong and boundaries and harshly disciplining him would not be advantageous, rather it would cause confusion and anxiety. I thought, “Umm yeah I do not believe that,” but I decided to capitulate rather than become argumentative. I still felt frustrated at the absence of disciple, which I unleashed my parting shot, “Dad, I know you were crying earlier, and you are an ugly crier.” I did not truly know what that phrase meant, but it is said on the House Wives shows my mom watches and it always gets a reaction so I thought it was appropriate to use in my closing remarks. My father rolled his eyes and stated he was never crying, to which I replied, “Yeah, well I am going to ask mom put it on Facebook, because if it is not on Facebook it is not real” as I exited the room.