The Water Cup That Wanted More

I was sitting on our back porch the other day when I happened to notice something that made me smile. I was sitting on the deck pushing anyone and everyone in the swing and happened to be facing the house. I noticed how clean and nice the neighbor's backyard light cover was and how dingy, old and gross ours was looking. For a half a second, I considered taking it off and cleaning it when I realized that could only lead to problems. You see when I was in college I lived in an apartment that we affectionately called Melrose Place. It was so named in honor of that old night time soap opera show in the 1990s that came on right after Beverly Hills 90210. (Mom - just to clarify, I NEVER watched that show. I know you outlawed it in our home and of course I would never disobey. Of course I never, ever watched it sitting two feet back from the tv set so at the first sound of your feet coming up the stairs I could change the channel. Nope. I've never actually seen it...but...umm....yeah...I've just heard of it.) At Melrose Place we have a more or less open door policy for walking into each other's apartments (at least the living room and kitchen areas). There were plenty of practical jokes and it was a real good time. Sometime before I moved into the apartment someone had taken off the light cover to replace a lightbulb at the front door and never replaced it. Our light was bare and all the other apartments had the clear glass cylinder shaped cover. The apartment was the sort of college place where when you wanted to move out you just had to find your own replacement and you could leave. That meant there were a lot of accumulated items that just stayed there because they had been abandoned or forgotten. Most of our dishes were in this category and not a single one of them matched another. One day when we had guests, someone commented how weird their cup was. It had a funky sort of lip at the top. Then everyone had to look at it and think about it and eventually, through the course of conversation, we realized it wasn't a cup at all. We had been using a light cover for at least a year as a cup. When we all stopped laughing, we washed it up and returned it to it's rightful place. Brian never lets me forget it though. Maybe it was him that figured it out. He was probably totally grossed out. Hey, at least we washed it.