While Joe watched some snooze-fest on Charlie Rose tonight, I diagrammed our refrigerator door. I'm not necessarily proud of this. In fact, there were a million other more productive things I could've, should've done. Ah well. At least now you know I have a framed photograph of my fiancé with his dentist and dental hygienist on the fridge. (And yes, they're posing with balloons.)
Note: This is just the top of my fridge. There's an entirely different collection of crap on the bottom.
Nothing major. Just a piece of white nylon rope that I stretched between two trees behind my house, a span that runs the width of my tiny backyard.
I did this because I'm green-washed and cheap. Since I live in Florida, where every day the sun shines, the birds chirp and Snow White kneels in my parched grass and summons Jay birds to her fingertips, I see no reason why I can't save some money (and the environment) by running my dryer a little less. Not to mention the fact that I love clotheslines, which is where my mom comes into play.
My mom can work a clothesline like nobody's business.
Growing up I used to stand beside her and hand her wooden clothespins as she pinched sheets on our clothesline, or draped my father's heavy jeans over two lines at once so they wouldn't sag to the ground.
My mom's clothesline is enormous; an almost Amish clothesline that my father cemented to the ground beside a corn field, that in the summer gets spread with liquid manure so pungent my mother used to run like a gazelle out the back door to rip the clothes down whenever the spreader ran its course.
"C'mon girls! Richmonds are spreading shit. Help me get the clothes off the line."
Anyone who grew up in the country with a clothesline knows this routine. I had friends whose mothers responded the same way, and some friends whose mothers did not. Hence some kid went to school with their Wranglers smelling like a barn.
Clotheslines also make me think of my Oma and my Nana. On summer evenings, I've stood beside either one of these women helping un-pinch my Papa's white T-shirts or my Opa's black socks.
There's a therapeutic monotony to hanging clothes on a line. The act of pulling pins out of a bucket is repetitive. Utilitarian. Time consuming. Lending itself to the act of daydreaming. Even better, saving money.
My mother loves the way sheets smell after they've hung out to dry on her clothesline. (This is on non-manure days.) When my sisters and I were little, she used to pull our sheets off the line and sniff them as we ran around her legs, clamping our lips with the pins to see how much pain we could withstand, charging through bath towels like Pamplona bulls.
There's a Zen-like serenity in the folds of sheets. When they were hanging out to dry, I used to walk between my parent's queen-sized sheets and try to make out silos in the distance. Through the thread-bare flapping of off-white cotton the world looked hazier, safer, lovelier, softer.
When a thunderstorm would roll in, we'd all help her pull clothes off the line. My dad too. Galloping out the back door, our black cocker spaniel following us like a shadow as we traipsed with armfuls of wet laundry into the house and down the stairs into the basement, where we had a second clothesline for winter drying, manure days and rain events.
As with any family whose clothes dry outside, there are were those embarrassingly awkward (or just plain uncomfortable) mornings when we'd pluck June Bugs out of our underwear. Or days when our jeans were so stiff from line drying they'd stand up like confederate soldiers and we'd have to pole vault our way in.
When my sisters and I were teenagers, we'd plead with our mother to tumble our jeans in the dryer.
"It's like you STARCHED 'em," we'd piss and moan.
When we had boys over I remember running to the clothesline to pull my ratty Hanes off the line before anyone arrived. Clotheslines are quaint when all that's drying on them are T-shirts, socks and sheets, but nothing is more mortifying than watching your pair of flowery high-waisted briefs flap like a faded circus parachute while you and your 16-year-old girlfriends chicken fight with boys in the pool.
So, here's to you Mothership: a late Mother's Day post, as I sit on my back deck, waiting for the washer to buzz, contemplating whether or not I should hang my baggy bloomers on the line, I am of course smiling and thinking of you.
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PS. AND to both my parents: Happy 30th wedding anniversary. Do something sappy tonight, will ya? Dad: don't work on the roof. Mom: don't do laundry. You guys should rent two-for-one romantic comedies at Shurfine and cuddle with Uncle Homer The Pug.
Just called my father, expecting it to be my mother. Since I'm all lazy and easy-like-Sunday morning, I figured I'd sort out this Popple tail thing over the phone.
"Hello Mothership."
"(Snort sound) This is your Fathership."
"Oh, Fathership. What's up with you?"
"I'm at 2,000 feet."
"In the plane?"
"Yup. Flying over Lake Erie right now. It's frozen from shore to shore."
"I think you get better reception over Lake Erie than you do on Jennings Road."
"(Snort sound.) Yeah, I know."
My father has a two-seater Cessna named Isabella that he and my Opa bought when I was about 11 years old. He got it shortly after he got his pilot's license – the culmination of months of night school, instrument training, a bevy of other FAA-regulated requirements and a medical exam.
Opa doesn't have his license.
When my dad flies, Opa sits next to him, living vicariously through the plane's passenger seat controls.
Oma wasn't too thrilled about Isabella. Neither was my mother. Night school was expensive and logging miles with a flight instructor cost even more.
The airplane however, when compared to what other men spend on less impressive toys, was cheap – relatively speaking. My dad had to entirely rebuild the engine. The labor cost nothing. He did it himself.
My mother calls Isabella, "The Other Woman." In fact, she's the one who named the plane Isabella. I think it made the hobby easier to digest – my father nurturing something human instead of machine. We women personalize everything. I think I Lanced about this already. Oh yeah. Briefly, here.
Anyway, my dad answered the phone. 2,000 feet in the air. Buzzing Lake Erie.
"Whatcha up to kiddo?"
"Joe's got a cold and I'm lounging around, eating pizza. A photographer friend is taking engagement pictures of us and the pug tonight."
"Engagement pictures?"
"Yeah. I wasn't going to do 'em, but he offered to take them for a case of beer. I think he wants glamour shots of the pug for his portfolio."
"What do people do with engagement pictures?"
"I don't know. Put them in a giant frame for people to sign at their wedding, I suppose."
"Hmm. Well that's pretty nice of him, to take them for free."
(Yeah. Too bad Joe is sick and the pug has eczema in his facial folds.)
"Dad, you're talking to me in the airplane, but I can barely hear the engine."
"You know it's great! I've got the cell phone stuck under my headset with both hands free and I can still hear the radio controls."
(And to think, he lectures me whenever I drive and talk on the phone.)
"Yesterday I was machining a part for your cousin Cory's truck and I figured I'd fly over his house to see if he was working on it today. Sure enough, saw him in the driveway, puttin' the alternator in."
"You were spying on him from the air?"
"Sure. I called him up too. Told him I was watching him from the sky. He looked up and started laughing."
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PS. I took the first two photos about three years ago while flying one summer with my dad over North Collins, N.Y. (my hometown.) If you squint, in that first one you can see our house.
PPS. The third photo is him and Isabella, sharing a private moment.
PPPS. The video below is Joe's first date with Isabella.
They live about an hour from me in a wooded mobile home park called The Royal Coachman – the quaintest retirement community on the Gulf Coast. And in my journalistic opinion, the best retirement community on the Gulf Coast.
PK will join me tomorrow for sun tannin' by the Royal Coachman pool and home cooked German meals in Oma's lanai. Until then, it's just me and the pug sleeping on a pullout sofa, listening to the sound of clocks tick and motorcycles rev muffler-lessly into the night.
Oma told me a story tonight that I'll share with you briefly before I fall asleep under these downy blankets.
It started first with Opa pinching his gray hair, which hangs in a kind of sparse dutch boy when it's freshly cut.
"Gerhard," Oma said. "The barber tuk a lot off dis time."
"Ja. That is because I told him to," said Opa. "Every time I go to him he schnibbles only a little around mein ears, so I have to come back two, tree veeks later. I told him to take it all off at vonce. I pay to get mein hair cut, so cut it mensch!"
Smiling, Oma reached around Opa's head and touched the bristled ends of his hair. She asked if I remembered tiptoeing up to him as a little girl – my sisters and I – clipping plastic barrettes in his hair while he was sleeping.
I remembered it vaguely.
Opa, who has a hard time remembering most things, remembered it like it happened yesterday.
My sister Heelya is particular about her teeth, which is understandable. She's had so many teeth drilled we joke that her mouth is a member of OPEC.
Because we didn't have dental coverage growing up we rarely saw the dentist. He was a haggler anyway, or at least that's what my dad said.
Of my two sisters Heelya spazzes out the quickest over things like germs and toenails. My dad likes to joke that my youngest sister PK should've been a doctor. She was always operating on the family, always carrying around a satchel of medieval looking tools, offering to fix our skin ailments, ingrown hairs, blisters, that sort of thing.
It was disgusting. I partially blame my Opa who owned the exact same kit - a zippered pouch of metal nail files, clippers, tweezers, and whatever other crevice digging devices might accompany such things. PK coveted the pouch as a little girl and whenever we visited my grandparents she would help herself to it in the cabinet with the bath towels and immediately start picking at her feet blisters. She was a figure skater so blisters ravaged her feet.
Soon she assumed ownership of the best tweezers in my house, the ones my father filed into daggers with points so sharp you could pierce the skin in one pinch, or kill an intruder under hostage circumstances. Regardless none of this has anything to do with the story I'm about to tell.
We all shared one bathroom - me, PK, Heelya, my mom, my dad and on weekends whatever friends had spent the night. Our toothbrushes never fit in one of those cup things with the holes in it. No matter what cup thing my mom purchased there were only four holes in it. God friggen forbid someone use the same color toothbrush, the same no-name brand Reach toothbrush and risk mistaken brush identity.
I pity my sister Heelya, but she should've known better when she purchased a blue toothbrush. My father had a blue toothbrush and unlike the time we all decided to label our toothbrushes with masking tape and my father labeled his Jerry Maguire because it was 1996 and all his girls had crushes on a pre-douchey Tom Cruise, unlike that time this time his blue toothbrush was not labeled.
For weeks, maybe months, my sister Heelya would wake up for school and brush her teeth with the same toothbrush my father had used to brush his teeth three hours earlier. By the time she grabbed the brush the bristles would be dry. She was totally clueless.
Until one day, she woke up earlier, reached for her brush and realized it was wet and the bristles were flattened. Over her morning bowl of cereal she asked my father, "Dad, what toothbrush are you using?"
Story goes he walked into the bathroom, reached for what he thought was his toothbrush and said, this one.
"Omigod," my sister shrieked.
Or so I think this is how it ends. When I called my dad this morning to confirm the details he said, "Yeesus Christ. Did your sister call you complaining about some kind of mouth virus?"
We're visiting Oma & Opa in a few hours, so in their honor, I will tell one staple story from the Opa Vault:
When my Opa was a kid (during and after) World War II he used to run around his hometown of Hildesheim, Germany thinking of ways to make money for his family.
During the war he'd collect bushels of rats, dead and alive, as the burgermeister would pay a good Mark for a solid bagful. Since the town was overrun by rats after the war this was a sehr gut business opportunity.
Now Opa, not one to pass up sehr gut business opportunities, was also a cunning and inventive klein scheisse. For example in the days after the war, when his mother insisted he go to church he and his brother Erwin would bid her guten tag, head up the street in their Sunday hosen, make a left turn at the bridge, scamper under the overpass, roll up their hosen and fish for brook trout in the creek. According to Opa they did this well, well into the morning and then at around the time church let out, he and Erwin would roll down their hosen and march back home. (As far as I know they got away with this for years, until the day his mother noticed Opa's Sunday hosen was spackled in mud and knowing her son, and his ways, sighed and said: "Gerhard Erich. Vy ist your hosen dis schmutzig?")
So to get back to the rats ... my Opa having discovered the dumpster in the alley in the village where the burgermeister was dumping the town's rat findings, started loading up his satchel with dozens and dozens of dead rats - because remember the rules were a five-rat-count earned you one mark, or something like that, and since it didn't much matter if the rats were delivered dead or alive Opa figured the plan was watertight. So for weeks he delivered black market rats to the burgermeister of Hildesheim, upon which was given proper payment and went on his way.
Now. I'm not sure if or how or when he got caught in the mittlere of this rat scheme but when I have lunch with him this afternoon I'll be sure to ask. As with all stories from the Opa Vault I draw blanks from time to time and if there's one thing Opa is sehr gut at, it's filling in the blanks on very old stories. Especially from Hildesheim.
Because the word blog sounds like something that comes out of a person's nose, I named this blog Lance after my old friend Sarah's fascination with a made-up cowboy named Lance.
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