Cleaning the Lint Trap

I wanted to grow up to be Malvina Reynolds, a singer-songwriter whose goal in life was nothing less than to change the world for the better, one song at a time. I have written many songs, and sung them, and am told that they have made a difference to some people, but I spend more time feeling like Lucy Ricardo than like Malvina Reynolds.

Let us consider the case of the lint trap.

A little red light on our clothes dryer came on the other day, and when I looked closely at it, I saw that it was next to the words, “Clean lint trap.”

Okay. After five years I could believe that there might be a little lint lurking in the crevices and crannies of the machine’s innards. I got out the vacuum cleaner, pulled out the lint screen, and first vacuumed that. Then I got the crevice tool and pushed it into the slot where the screen fits, and vacuumed that. After that I opened the little door on the slot and peered in with a flashlight to see if any more lint needed to come out.

Holy mother of Martha Stewart. It looked like an unshorn gray sheep had died in there.

I always like to use the right tool for the job, so I went and got a chopstick out of the silverware drawer, and started fishing lint out. I managed to pull out several wads, but reached a point when I realized the chopstick just wasn’t long enough, so I looked around, and my eye fell on my knitting bag. A knitting needle! Of course! They’re longer than chopsticks and have little caps on the ends that would hook the lint! I grabbed a long blue plastic #9 needle, and went back to the dryer to scoop lint. One scoop: it worked great! That’s when I let go and it fell into the lint trap.

This is when my troubles began.

I could see it down there. I thought of trying to get it out with its mate, but was spooked at that point and didn’t want to chance dropping a second needle in. I knew exactly what I needed to get it out, but I don’t have one.

What I needed was a little grabby-thingy that you used to be able to get at True Value for years. It has a plunger on one end, a long narrow spring tube, and teeny tiny little metal claws on the other end which you can use to pick up teeny tiny things that you drop in small inaccessible places, such as a dryer lint trap. I knew if I had one of those, I could get that needle out easily.

So I went up to True Value, and asked Bob Kueker where to find such a thing. We walked up and down aisles, looking. There was an extension rod with a magnet on the end, but that was no help with a plastic knitting needle. Pretty soon hardware guy Eric Peterson showed up, and Eric is an absolute terrier about finding what you need, so he looked around and made suggestions; then hardware guy Jeff Astle showed up and got involved in the search, and pretty soon we were all talking about the grabby-thingy, and then the two of them went off looking for it. None of us knew the proper name for this tool, and I had only one name for it, and I was resisting saying it.

Back in the early 70s, when I first arrived on Vashon, I dallied for a few months with a long-haired young man named Robert Wallace. He made dope pipes out of lamp parts for a living, and was always dropping little things on the floor and picking them up, and he decided he needed this grabby-thingy. He said, with a gleeful smile, “I need a mouse castrator.”

Excuse me?

He explained what it was, and we went to the hardware store and got one, and he was happy and I was forever stuck with that name for that tool.

As Bob at True Value began paging through the tool catalogues looking for this item, I finally said, “The only name I know for this thing is ‘mouse castrator.” “Excuse me?” said Bob. I told him the story of Robert Wallace.

Eric and Jeff came back, reporting that their searches had not turned up the grabby-thingy. The only name I had for it came out then. I don’t think the guys were able to concentrate on selling any hardware for the next twenty minutes. Something about the expression was like throwing a large rock into a pool of emotion. It caused a certain excitement and a lot of comedic riffing, which I enjoy, but the fact is we still didn’t know the right name for the tool and couldn’t find it in any catalogue. I bought a dryer lint trap brush and went home.

Back home I used the lint brush to pull out more wads of lint, but when I tried to put the lint screen back in the dryer, it wouldn’t go all the way down because the needle was in the way. Poop.

This morning I put the screen in and it went all the way down. I figured the needle was lying flat in the bottom of the lint trap, safely out of the way, so I threw some wet clothes into the dryer and turned it on. Arrgh! It sounded like a tiny little machine gun as the needle was sucked into the fan. Quickly I turned off the dryer.

The noise woke my husband, who was home sick. When he came shuffling out of the bedroom, wondering, what the heck? I explained the story so far.

He got in touch with his inner Mechanical Person, and ended up taking the dryer apart and fishing out the three separate pieces of the knitting needle, plus the cap. Then he cleaned out the lint trap thoroughly, put it all back together.

I threw some towels in. I turned it on, and nothing caught fire and it seems to be running fine. The knitting needle and its mate have gone to their final reward. My husband is a prince. I still don’t have a grabby-thingy, but maybe I can get back to saving the world one song at a time now.

Laying Lois to Rest

A friend will help you move; a true friend will help you move the body.

The female cousins got together last week. My cousin Michal and her husband Bud came out from Ohio; my cousin Nancy came over from Soap Lake; and Nancy’s sister Charlotte, my other cousin, came up from California. We are cousins through the Litchfield line – my father and their mothers were siblings.

My father had three sisters: his older sister Thelma, and his younger sisters Lois and Vivian. Michal is the daughter of Lois; Nancy and Charlotte are the daughters of Vivian. Thelma and Lois hated each other. We do not know what lay at the bottom of this sibling war; we do know that it went with them to their graves.

Oh, wait. I forgot. Lois doesn’t have a grave.

Lois, Michal’s mom, was the last surviving sibling. She passed on back in 2001. She was cremated, and her ashes sent to her only child, Michal, who lives in Ohio. Michal knew that it was her mother’s wish to have her ashes scattered in the ocean, so she put the container with Lois’ remains on a shelf with the uneasy knowledge that Lois hated Ohio and would not want to make it her final resting place.

Lois hated a lot of things and people. You always knew where you stood with Lois: on the defense. She was not without love and laughter, but when we remember her we remember, holy cow, what a piece of work she was. It is a lifetime assignment to make sense of a parent who both loved and scarred you.

Michal decided that it was time to lay her mom to rest.

Lois was returned to the West Coast in a small, heavy box. The female cousins convened, and we discussed where and how to scatter the ashes.

We found was that when you’re talking about disposing of human remains, the atmosphere gets swingy, going from laughter to tears and back again within minutes. Our conversation shifted back and forth from talking about Lois as if she wasn’t there, to talking directly to the box as if she was.

We had a ceremonial opening of the box, and then the tin inside, to view all that remained of Lois. I suppressed the urge to say that she looked like she could use a good moisturizer.

The next morning we all squeezed into the rental car and went out looking for a final resting place for Lois. The main requirements were that it be water, and that we could quietly have a little ceremony without being disturbed, or caught.

We drove until we came to a place that seemed to be the right place, and pulled over, and we walked a ways until we were close to the edge.

Michal stood there for a while looking at the water. Finally she said, “Mom, I love you.” She paused, she shed a few tears, and then she said, “And I know you loved me.” She upended the bag and released Lois to the water and the earth and the ages. We watched in silence as the waves’ action began to distribute Lois’s remains, then we all hugged, and wiped our eyes, and laughed.

We remember these parents and aunts and uncles who raised us. We’re the older generation now, but we remember each other as young and cute and starting life with the infinite optimism of the untried. We remember each other before the boyfriends and husbands and children and divorces and layoffs and illnesses and accidents and deaths. Before all the crushing realities of adult life, we were kids together.

There is something sweet about growing older in a circle of love with people whom you have known, and have known you, forever. We hold, and help, and heal one another. We put things into perspective, and we help each other lay our loved ones and our old sorrows to rest, and, always, we laugh together from the centers of our souls. That is the deep sweetness of family.

I had to live this long to find that out.

“In returning and rest we shall be saved.”

It has been a couple of weeks since my job ended, and although that fact is the biggest thing in my mind and thoughts, what I’m feeling right now a need for sanctuary. It isn’t that I don’t like people; it is that people wear me out. I feel like I’m cruising for a fall with all the activities I’ve been taking on lately. Good activities, but a person needs to stop and recharge.
Like right now – I’m fighting the urge to go to sleep, and it’s only 7:30 in the evening. Just returned from taking Allysan to see Ratatouille, which is an okay movie – I enjoyed it and it even scored a couple of major yuks – but it wore both Allysan & me out. She of course perked right up when I dropped her off at her mom’s. She’s five, though. I’m not five, I’m a little older, and I’m feeling downright woozy here.
The projects I need to undertake have been cropping up in my mind: recording all of my original songs, or at least the ones I can remember; that Christmas album I’ve been wanting to do for years; publishing collections of my essays and Rick’s cartoons; and…well, you know, I’ve never really lacked things to do, only the time and energy to do them.
When my friend Sonya came to visit, she brought a CD she’d had made of a recording made in October, 1971. It was a reunion of the Repertory Music Company: Van Webster, Randy Norton, Bruce Willard, Scott Stewart, and me, the chick singer/songwriter. Dale Covey was on the engineering board. Sonya was in the kitchen, and received a spontaneous standing ovation for her chilies rellenos, of which each bite was a little mouthful of heaven. I can still taste it.
Listening to the CD was humbling, and inspiring. I was surprised to hear that, really, I wasn’t a bad songwriter back then, and really, I hit some good notes here and there, and really, I tended to write songs that were ‘way over my singing ability and control, which led to bad notes. The bad notes were the humbling part.
That hit me, and I also wondered why I thought I was the only thing in the world happening back then. Youth? Insecurity? ADD? The desire to be the best singer in the world, ever? All of the above?
I find I appreciate the guys I worked with a lot more now, and I’m grateful that in that reunion session each one of them got to sing a song (except Scotty, the drummer, who did not sing). It was good to hear their voices again.
And it’s good to hear my own voice again, as I try to break off the rust and limber up my vocal cords. I even did some opera warm ups the other day. I can do that now that the Doberman is dead. Man, she hated opera almost as much as Rick does, and she howled her displeasure.
OK, that’s enough blogging for a sleepy Sunday evening. If this is all there is to blogging, I can do it.

Unemployment is Good for You. Or for me, anyway

I did write a couple of pages longhand this morning. It is strange to realize that blogging is the modern version of the journal keeping I did so obsessively for years -- only this is meant to be read, and I would have died, just died, if anyone had seen my journals back then. That was meant only for me -- so this is new, and different, and I don't feel like I have much to say.
Except! That my blood pressure is down twenty or thirty points. Did I mention that already?
I am much more relaxed than I was while employed. It is nice not to feel so constantly driven. It is nice not to feel like my heart might give out any moment. It still might, you never know, but I am not living in constant fear that it will, and that alone probably gives me better odds.
I am starting to take care of medical/dental maintenance items that I have been putting off. Sigh. It's good to be Unemployed.

Getting Started on this whole blog thing

It has come to my attention that blogging is the way to go. So here I go.
It's a lovely summer evening here on Vashon, the end of a hot summer day. Dinner is warming up in a cast iron frying pan in the kitchen, and I should probably go eat some.
Our grand daughter is here for the night, so her mom & mom's significant other can do some moving around of stuff at their house.
Having just quit my job, I'm shopping around for the Next Thing. Right now the Next Thing seems to be sitting here typing while Everybody Loves Raymond reruns are playing on cable.
OK, dinner, seriously.