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Jennifer Garner must have asked me a thousand times, “What’s in your wallet?” The answer is always the same, “Nothing, absolutely nothing!” I keep hoping maybe she has put some money in there without me knowing, but no, it’s still nothing. A more pertinent question might be, “What’s under your bed?” There’s stuff under there. There has always been stuff under there.   

One little boy asked his mother if it was true that mankind really came from dust. When she answered, “Yes,” he then asked, “Is it true that when we die, we will turn back to dust.” Again, she answered in the affirmative and said, “Dust to dust.” She asked him why he was asking such questions. He replied, “Well, I was hiding under my bed when I discovered somebody else was under there, but I couldn’t tell if he was coming or going.”

When I was a boy, my older brother and sister told me all kinds of tall tales about monsters and creepy crawlers that were hiding under my bed. They told me those creatures would drag me under there and eat me alive…bones and all! My old iron frame bed set so high off the floor that a herd of elephants might have been hiding under there. I was so afraid to get near the edge that I jumped in the bed from as far away as possible!

When I got a little older, I realized there actually wasn’t room under my bed for monsters. I became the monster under the bed as I grabbed my niece and nephews from under there by the ankles when they walked by. I’ve thought about trying that now with my wife, but there are a few problems with that. One is that I’m too big to squeeze under there, and even if I did, I’m probably too old and stiff to wiggle my way back out! The other problem is that there’s too much stored under there to store me under there…but if I did that, she might try! 

We use our under-the-bed space for storage.  It seems that many houses never have enough closets or storage space. The old house where I grew up did not have closets. I hung my clothes on 16-penny nails driven into the board door facings. Before you say, “You can’t hang many clothes on a nail,” I say, “Correct, but I didn’t have many.” Since there weren’t really any monsters under my bed, I began using that space for storage.  I kept a large but not very tall box under there to house my extra model cars. I was an avid model builder, but I soon had too many to keep them all out on display. They were inexpensive back then. I put out a few at a time and kept the rest under the bed. Every few weeks, I rotated them and put out different ones.

One of the things I still keep under my bed is my shoes. That dates back to my closet-less childhood as well. Back then, I kept shoes there because I didn’t have anywhere else to keep them. Since I never owned more than two-or-three pairs at the same time, that wasn’t much of a problem. These days I probably have more shoes than I had in my entire life of back then. I keep my favorites that I wear the most under the bed and the rest in my closet. I probably need to rotate them like I did my models, but Jean says I definitely shouldn’t leave the others on display in the floor!  What’s under your bed?