FREEBIE: ONE HUSBAND (delivery available)

"Hey, if you can watch it like this, I guess we got a keeper." I walked out of the back room in time to hear my husband finalizing his tuning efforts. He looked up at me and asked me if it was acceptable. Upon the giant TV screen was a completely yellow picture full of fuzz. I choked back my sarcasm as my eyes bulged which seemed to signal my answer.

My husband has this one annoying vulnerability in life. He brings home anything "free." It doesn’t matter if it’s needed or desired. The point to him is that it’s up for grabs and costs nothing, so it is to be taken home. Consider one singular bar stool minus a wicker seat, scraps of misshapen carpets that have no use other than to be patch-worked together quilt-style for the garage, old computer keyboards that sit on shelving in said garage, a practically new monitor to eventually go with the free giant Rolling Stones rock concert speakers that function as garage tables, buckets (lots of buckets), old cream colored, stained drapery that came from someone’s windows (he thought I’d like to hang them on OUR windows -- NOT), and the list goes on. Half the time, I reject the items before they ever come out of his vehicle. This does not account for the other half. Last night, my husband won the jackpot on freebies.

I never knew what hit me. I thought he’d truly gone nuts and spent all of our savings on a television set as wide as the piano and twice as tall. He merrily laid behind it, legs poking out from around the back. Boys were hunched around him in anticipation. Upon hearing me gasp, they turned in glee. Now what has he done, is all I could think. Proudly, my husband peaks from behind the large set to explain that some tenants in the building he works obtained a brand new flat screen television and gave this one to him. Mind you, this thing is colossal. Our small living room, which barely holds one sofa, one piano, one small TV and one fireplace, suddenly felt like a room out of Alice in Wonderland. My husbands long legs trailing across the only bare space in the living room looked sorely out of place. He continued on to proudly tell me that we are now the proud new owners of this mammoth television set. I kept my thoughts silent and bit my lip. I wondered why a family that does not subscribe to cable TV and rarely turns on the set needs such a thing. I left the room with mixed feelings – feelings that are oh so familiar to me.

A couple of hours later as his legs still protruded from behind the set, the boys long gone, I summoned the courage to ask him if he’d tested the set before he lugged it home in a borrowed flat-bed truck.. If you guessed that his answer was, "no," you have hit the jackpot.

We are now the "proud" owners of a drive-in movie screen right in the middle of our living room. We can watch giant yellow fuzz anytime we like thanks to another "freebie." Mind you, this was said with a level of sarcasm that could peal paint off a ship. I have a "freebie" of my own to give away, and I will deliver. Any takers?