Dialogue With My Dishwasher

My appliances are for the most part an amiable bunch. I get along with most of them just fine.

My stove is an easygoing sort. Not a high-end type, just a good solid stove. The burner tops are a little hard to clean but we’ve never come to blows over that.

As for my refrigerator, it may be taller than I am and lacking in those important self defrost areas but we get along.  I mean I like them both. They do their jobs and keep quiet about it.

But that dishwasher is another hunk of parts altogether.

I adored my dishwasher. You might say I worship at her altar. You might also ask why I anthropomorphize her. It’s easy. She has real presence.  She rules the kitchen.

I welcomed her with open arms. I embraced everything about her. She changed my dreary dishpan saddled life into one of orderliness and simplicity. No longer am I faced with a sink full of yucky dishes. No longer do my hands look pruney and wizened. No longer do I soak pot and pans.

Now that I am totally dependent upon her, I am a slave to her whims.

“Don't whine to me about your dumb Portuguese dishware,” she seems to be saying as I grudgingly wash my pretty ceramic cups by hand.

“Did I say anything?” I retort. “I know you will attack these poor pieces of pottery and scratch them to death so I don't let you wash them anymore. Couldn't you take it easy on a few of my favorites?”

“Too bad you have to make such a big deal about foreign dishware. Look here. I’m ready to accept all the made-in-America-certified-dishwasher-safe cookware you can find and wash them to perfection and you kibitz about earthenware. Who needs the stuff?”

“These ‘foreign’ dishes are beautiful! It's a joy to look at them. They make food taste better. And besides, that serviceable dishware you like isn’t particularly pretty.”

“Pretty! All you talk about it pretty! It’s about function my dear. After all, isn't it really about the food you’re eating not what you are eating off of?”

“I consider what I eat off of very important aesthetically.”

“Oh my god and a snob to boot!”

 “Come on. Just because you can’t handle the good stuff, don't judge me because I have good taste, you xenophobic dish mangler you.”

“Well, I just might stop working. That will show you

As I recall, my predecessor passed on the day before Christmas?”

“You’re blackmailing me? Go ahead. A lot of good you do me on Christmas anyway. You won’t accept 90% of my good dinnerware.”

“There you go again. Picky picky.”

“Or my mother’s silverware! You've made me give up wooden spoons. Buy very expensive stainless steel pots and pans. You've taken over my kitchen!! You are a tyrant.”

“Like I said, I can just go on strike. You can go back to washing stacks and stacks of dirty disgusting pots and pans. See if I care.”

“Oh go suck a lemon.”

“I’m a machine. I don't eat.”

See? She’s incorrigible. She has me cornered. I either do things her way or do the dishes myself.

I already wash my cast iron skillets by hand. She so thoroughly cleaned and dried them they had to be re-seasoned after every wash. Since cast iron is truly the best cookware I absolutely refuse to give them up.

Or take knives. If I want my knives to stay sharp I have to forget the dishwasher.  She will emasculate them in a trice.

And then there is all the stuff I wash by hand so she won’t be over stuffed. I look out for her why can’t she do me a favor or two?"

It seems that now I have to do everything her way. I finally replaced my aluminum cookie sheets. I had to buy new stronger cutlery.  My wooden chopping boards stay in the closet afraid to come out.  And she really did do a number on my Portuguese pottery. She chewed most of them up and spit them out at me.

So I surrendered. She won. I got rid of them just to shut her up.

Actually that's not the truth. I couldn’t really get rid of them. But after a look at my pruney hands I did put those adorable dishes at the top of the cupboard where she can’t see them and I can look at them longingly.

The Free Three

Over the summer I have taken a morning walk almost every day. I try to take different routes but the one I like best is the one with the three free blocks.

I start at 108^th St. and measure the distance. 20 blocks equals one mile. But the really great thing is that if I head north I get three free blocks to my mile.    Between 120^th and 125^th there are three extra blocks. La Salle, Tieman and St. Clair. That means when I reach 125^th  I have walked a whole mile. I get three free blocks.

But when I walk to 135^th I have walked only 27 blocks. I lose my three free blocks and I feel annoyed and cheated. But that’s what it says on Google maps and that's what my son, Tony, has explained to me.

“Mom”, he says patiently, “I really can’t believe you refuse to see this. Look at a map. 125^th street veers north and has skipped three blocks by the time it ends at Riverside Dr. Those three blocks aren’t free at all, they just have names. Look the next block after 125 is 128.”

“Yeah but those were free blocks just the same and they took them away.”

“Oh Mom. They were never free to begin with.”

“Its like Clare and Vinnie in Life with Father,” I say.

“Okay, tell me,” Tony sighs.

“You have to understand that Clare was played by William Powell and Irene Dunne played Vinnie.”

“You mean the man had a girl’s name and the wife was named after a mobster?”

“Not exactly. It’s more Victorian era. Anyway, there’s a great scene in which they are doing the monthly accounts and Vinnie’s household account is $3 overdrawn. “

Vinnie says something like “I’m overdrawn this month? I just don't understand how that could be.”

“Well, you are by exactly $3.  Let’s go over the purchases in detail,” insists Clare.

“Sounds like you and Daddy”.

“Not at all. We are smart enough to keep separate accounts.”

“Really?”

To go on with my story

Vinnie looks over her bills and declares,” There it is: three shirts at $ 1.00 each. It was your new shirts that caused the trouble.”

“My shirts? How could they cause a problem?”

“I bought them for you and you didn't like the cut of the collar. I paid three dollars for them  and when I returned them the sweet young salesman very nicely gave me three dollars in cash.”

Clare stops for a brief moment before he asserts, “He shouldn't have done that. You charged those shirts.”

“Well he did. And there I was with three extra dollars.”

“Those dollars were not extra.”

“Well what were they then? I didn't have them before the nice young salesman handed them to me. And then there they were, right there in my hand.”

Clare’s voice begins to rise, “But don't you see they should have gone back into the household money. A return to cover a debit?”

“A what dear?”

“A return to cover a debit.”

“Well with that extra money, I had enough to buy that lovely pink hat I saw as I entered the store.”

“But you didn’t have extra money. You were using money you didn't really have. You were overdrawn.”

“You remember I wore it to church last Sunday and you said how lovely I looked?”

“Oh, Vinnie.”

“That story is intentionally confusing, Mom,” Tony tells me.

“The only thing confusing about this story was the names. Those were free dollars just like my streets and I am not going to let any old map change my mind.

Don't I look and feel healthier walking those extra blocks?”

 “Oh, Mom.”

Happy Homes

Yes, I grew up in a place called Happy Homes. I’ve never questioned the name. After all, I was happy.

Between 1947 and 1953, my family lived in this post war “dream world”. Everyone called it Happy Homes. No one I’ve asked seems to remember its real name.

Far from being utopian, it was nonetheless wonderful for its times. The development was created under the GI Bill to give returning veterans a leg up toward reestablishing their lives.

The rent was incredibly low. Our two bedroom apartment rent was $35 a month, which wasn’t much even for those days.

It was essentially subsidized housing, although I don’t think the term was used or even invented back then in 1947.

Anyway, Happy Homes was located east of Dayton, Ohio and adjacent to Wright Patterson Air Force Base. It was made up of renovated army barracks.

Now before you start imaging Stalag 17 or those dreadful grey cement block warehouses for soldiers, let me tell you the powers that planned Happy Homes did a really nice job of creating one and two bedroom apartments that were bright and appealing. Each one had a brand new kitchen and bathroom and a back yard.

Ours was Apartment 3G. Daddy built a picket fence and Mama planted roses. She happily decorated the rooms with  maple furniture and wallpaper in the then popular Early American style. I can’t find any pictures, but I remember it as warm and pretty. My parents took their wedding furniture out of storage and bought a twin bed for me. I had my own room situated in the perfect position for hiding behind a chair to watch TV when I was supposed to be asleep. The trick was to watch I Love Lucy at 9:00 on Mondays but be asleep before Inner Sanctum’s really scary creaking door began at 9:30.

The center of the apartment was a gas fireplace, which heated the whole place. There we could dry wet gloves and slowly roast the chestnuts and pumpkin seeds my father was so fond of.

There were about a hundred families in the development. Everyone was about the same age.  There were parties, kaffe klatches and canasta clubs. Most of the women didn't work, so they got together and had fun. My mom had been stuck living with her mother during the war years, so she loved having a group of ready-made friends.

Daddy was a produce man, which meant our fruits and vegetable were the best. At the end of the day when he drove his big truck home, he would give away a lot of it to our neighbors but kept the best for our family. We had bowls of fruit all the time. Sometimes too much - like rhubarb. Stewed rhubarb, rhubarb pie and even rhubarb cobbler loses its appeal when you eat it every day for weeks.

I was shocked at the price of rhubarb when I grew up and had to buy it myself. I was even more shocked at how much I wanted it.

As for ethnic diversity – well, that was an unknown concept for the residents of Happy Homes, unless you count the Vacciano, the Bova or the Gentile families and two or three war brides from Britain.

I remember that our next door neighbors had reservations about letting their son play with me, that Italian girl.  I do recall my mother making me play with Brucie,  a glum little kid who stole candy whenever he visited. He did prove useful when we needed a boy for our make believe games. I remember playing brides with a veil made from a parachute quite happily until someone said we needed a groom. We commandeered Brucie for that. He had to marry every little girl involved. He got tired and wanted to quit so we changed it to Scheherazade so he could kill each bride by throwing her on the sprinkler. He found it a very satisfying way to spend an afternoon. 

I remember liking and being liked by our neighbors - with the exception of Helen Collins, Brucies’s mother, who seemed to be hanging around our apartment a lot more than I liked. She had a way of spoiling things, like the time I was eating the last piece of watermelon and she asked for a bite. A look from my mother made me say ok, but then she sprinkled salt all over the whole slice, ate one little piece and left me with what I considered a spoiled treat. Maybe her watermelon needed salt but my watermelon did not.

It wasn't that Helen was so bad, it was just that she was so there all the time, sort of taking over and talking non-stop. She also saw herself as playful and cute. She was the only one of that opinion. Although she was Mama’s friend, she sure seemed to like Daddy a lot.

I remember her watering her flowers one afternoon as he returned from work. “Don’t you look hot and sweaty!” she giggled as she aimed her hose at him. My dad laughed but I could tell this really got to him.

A little while later, Helen was sitting on the patio showing off her new permanent waved hair when my dad, now all bathed and refreshed, called me inside to help him.

I followed and watched him fill a pot with water and go to the front porch where he climbed up onto the roof. I was needed to hand the water up to him.

I ran to the other side of the building where Helen was sitting and watched transfixed as Daddy doused her and her new permanent. It was a great moment. It was better than salting her watermelon, which she would have liked anyway.

Everyone at Happy Homes was allotted a garden plot to grown vegetables. The gardens were in a former cornfield, so the yield was usually lots of corn plus whatever else you planted that could tough it out against the corn. The tomato harvest made it worth while. Lots and lots of ripe, delicious tomatoes seemingly for free.

We kids had the surrounding fields to explore, which ended at the fence separating us from the very active air force base. We watched jets take off and heard the sound barrier broken over and over. When there was an air show in the spring we didn't need to go any farther than our back yard to watch the Thunderbirds do their amazing feats.

There were berry bushes all around the perimeter of the field in the summer. We would bring pockets full of back raspberries home to our moms, who would be equally delighted and aghast at the sight of our purple stained clothes. We would be dumped into our respective bathtubs and our clothes taken to the washroom / play area that served twenty families.

That was also the location of the single pubic telephone. You needed a nickel to make a call so the idea was to give all your friends the signal: Two rings, hang up and wait for them to call back.

Most of the other kids went by bus to a nearby public school, but I went to St. Joseph’s parochial school in downtown Dayton, where I learned all about the threat of Communism and how the first thing those fiends would do when Stalin overran the Ohio Valley was hang all the nuns from the trees down by the Miami river.  

For a period of time the Catholics of Happy Homes got together every evening to pray the rosary before dinner. Attendance dwindled rather quickly.  I guess we weren’t worried enough about the Communists and what they would do to the nuns to eat dinner late.

1n the winter of 1950, a blizzard big enough to close all the roads hit. The snow was up to our windowsills.   No one could get in or out of Happy Homes for a week. It was wonderful. No school, no church, no chores, even no food was fun. We cleaned out the little neighborhood grocery store and ate hostess crème filled cup cakes and popcorn for dinner. I loved it. There was so much snow we built not just snowmen but an igloo big enough to climb inside and happily freeze.

Even with the low rent of 35 dollars a month, saving enough for a down payment on a house wasn't easy. At some point, I decided it was my job to get things moving.  I was enchanted with the prospect of finding the perfect house with all the precise specifications needed for us to be the perfect family. I drew house plans and decorated my room over and over.

It became my mission to get hold of the daily newspaper and check out the real estate ads. Sunday papers were the best. When the post war building boom began, there were giant advertisements of beautiful new housing developments.

Whenever I could get both my parents together I would read them my list of possibilities.

“OK.” I would say, “Listen to this one. There bedrooms with a patio and garbage disposal in a new plat near grandma’s house.” That was vetoed for obvious reasons.

“Or how about this old house for less money? We could fix it up!”

 "No, no. " Both Mama and Daddy agreed. They wanted new. New everything.

Our Sundays were taken up with Mass, lunch and visits to model homes.

After what seemed to be to be an eternity, we found a house we fell in love with. Some astute sales person had charmingly decorated the model home in the Early American style my mom loved. It was in a new neighborhood not too near and not too far from either set of in-laws. It was brick and well constructed.  There was a maple kitchen and an entry hall just calling out for a cute little desk.  I swear the amenity that sold us all was the magazine rack in the bathroom. This was modern living at its finest.

We moved out of Happy Homes the day before Eisenhower was inaugurated. Within the next few years most of the original families also moved out to their own bright sparkly new houses. For most people the dream really come true.

I don't know how long the development lasted. It was long gone when I looked for it 20 years ago.

But I do know that permanent friendships were made there. Anytime we ran into someone who lived there, the one thing we could agree on was how darned happy we had been in Happy Homes.

Eat It With a Spoon

Don't ask me why, but I started to think about spoons very early this morning, 4:30 AM to be more accurate.

I woke up worrying about nothing and tried to change the subject. Nothing worked until I said to myself, “ Write something, stop dithering about nothing." I didn’t say it out loud but I did listen to myself and searched for a topic and somehow I came up with spoons.

I thought about those spoons J. Alfred Prufrock used to measure out his life. Were they his good spoons or the ones he used for everyday. I just know J. Alfred had more than one set of tableware. Probably those spoons belonged to a grand hostess and they were much nicer than the ones he had at home.

And what about the dish who ran away with a spoon? What did they see in each other?  Which was the guy and which was the girl? Did they break the hearts of a happy place setting when they ran off? Or they could have been gay. Was there a lesson in tolerance here? Why should cutlery only intermarry with cutlery? And dishes stick with cups ands saucers?

There is something about spoons I’ve always liked.  I like the feel of their shiny round bowls. They stack nicely in drawers. Knives and forks slip and slide, spoons nestle inside each other. They are the contented cutlery.

Spoons are benign, not at all fierce like forks or knives. As far as I know there has never been a murder by spoon. I base this assumption on my acquaintance with English mysteries where, god knows, almost everything else has been tried.

Spoons are really good at what they do. We couldn't stir our sauces or eat our cereal without them. I suppose we should be grateful to the ancients who invented them. I bet they were invented before forks, I mean forks you could do without. You could grab a hunk of meat or a handful of millet and just chew away. But what about soup or stew?

I think the invention of spoons had to be coincidental with the first pots and consequently soup. A civilizing impulse. A branch would do nicely for stirring, but how do you eat soup? Some smarty probably hollowed out the end of a thick piece of wood and invented the spoon. And then bragged about it and made spoons the latest thing. No Neanderthal hostess would have dared entertained without them.

I also started to count how many different kinds of spoons I have around the house. There are teaspoons, soup spoons, coffee spoons, measuring spoons and a whole variety of sizes for serving including the slotted kind. Then there is the array of spoons for cooking from wooden to stainless steel to plastic. And ladles. What would we do without ladles? Ladles are the sloppy cooks salvation,

I have always liked the quaint term spooning. Cuddling as it were. A nice way to have your lover draped around you like a spoon.

I remember the saying “He’s so cute I could eat him with a spoon.” So do I need to say it wasn't meant pruriently?  It was an appreciative term also applied to chubby babies that I guess just wouldn't sound right nowadays.

There is a rock band named Spoon, in case you are interested. I can’t work up any great enthusiasm.

Fancy spoons said a lot about people then, the fancier the spoon the more money you had.

Sets of Apostle spoons used to be common wedding gifts. Why the apostles? Were other types of cutlery given separately? Knives maybe, but never forks.

Who knows? But a silver spoon was and still is a very popular gift for new babies. Might the intention have been to  make up for the silver spoon this particular baby wasn’t fortunate enough to have in its mouth at birth?

Then there are spoonerisms. This got me out of bed to look up. A spoonerism is a scrambling of letters like Search every crook and nanny. Or I’ll be an unkies muncle. A favorite was the introduction on Inauguration Day of the new president as Hoober Heever. Maybe this jinxed him.

I also found an article titled “What your spoon say about you” from the book  Consider the Fork. My assumption that spoons came before forks was all wrong. Apparently they were first used 18th century. Kind of late in my opinion.

Then there are the spoons of my childhood. I was enchanted with my grandmother’s tea service, which included a set of salt cellars each one equipped with its own miniature spoon. I thought they were meant just for me.

Every summer my grandparents would take the car out of the garage, scrub it down and turn it into a playhouse for the grandchildren. We had a bedroom area where our dolls beds went. We had a set of bunk beds and a bassinet.  There were tables and chairs. No living room though. The kitchen area consisted of a very old miniature iron coal stove. I think it was a salesman’s model although how a salesman could have lugged this thing around is beyond me.

Anyway once or twice a summer Grandpa would put some hot coals in it so we could cook in the little cast iron pots and pans.  We had doll-sized dishes to serve whatever we made but the prize was a tiny set of cutlery I still have. My grandsons aren’t interested but I still keep that fancy fake set in its own plastic imitation silver chest.

The wooden spoon played a part in my growing up: it was the weapon of choice in the parental battle for decorum. When my cousins and I got out of hand running around the house threatening destruction my grandmother would come out of the kitchen yelling “If you don't quiet down I’ll get the wooden spoon.” It usually worked, my grandmother being the no nonsense person she was. I don't remember that that wooden spoon was ever used though.  When Mama brandished the wooden spoon we just laughed.

If J. Alfred measured out his life in teaspoons let me get out my measuring spoons and choose at least the tablespoon or better the ladle for my own. I say eat life in great gulps of appreciation or in tiny coffee spoon of deliciousness.