A Woman’s Work versus a Man’s, and a Few Thoughts
by Barry Bauer
A woman’s work is never done because her list is too long. On the other hand a man’s work is never done either because quite frankly, he doesn’t do it.
“Honey”, a man will hear from his wife, “The front storm door is hanging by a screw and it’s going to fall off!” Of course a man replies, “I’ll get to it tomorrow, dear. Right now I’ve got a football game!”
Since Betty’s illness I’ve had to take over some of her duties. Keep in mind I didn’t say all of them. Some things had to go wanting. I’ve had to do the laundry on rare occasions before, so it was nothing new to me. I did have to learn when to add bleach and when not to. When I was in high school I had the first pair of bleach spotted Levis. The boarding house lady washing my clothes obviously added the bleach at the wrong time. I also had to learn how much laundry detergent I needed to use. The instruction on the washing machine lid told me that the problem with the clothes not coming clean was because I didn’t use enough detergent.
I always thought you had to watch out for over-sudsing. Guess I was wrong.
We had a mattress pad that was overdue for a washing and because we can’t get it in our washer, I needed to take it to a Laundromat. I had no fear about doing this; I’ve been there before. I chose the biggest washer they had and stuffed the mattress pad inside. It only took 15 quarters to operate it.
Whatever happened to the old days when three or four quarters did the trick?
The machine told me when to add detergent and when to add bleach and then it took off. First it rotated left, and then it rotated right. It spun for a bit and then repeated this again for three or four times. I wasn’t really counting; I was distracted by something else. I kept waiting for the door of the washing machine to blow off. The mattress pad took on more water than what’s in Rainbow Lake.
It finally came to a stop and that’s when I got a brilliant idea. Why not throw it in one of their dryers and lighten the burden on our dryer? I took it over to a dryer, put it in, and then put a quarter in it. That was supposed to give me six minutes of drying time. Well, nothing happened. So I put three more quarters in and still nothing happened.
I had two choices, cut and run, or ask for help. Being a man I ran. I wasn’t going to tell anyone that I didn’t know how to operate the dryer.
In doing all of this laundry the one thing that hasn’t come up is ironing. With today’s Perma-Press or the wrinkled look, there’s very little need for it. I’m no stranger to ironing because I used to iron the weekly laundry on a mangle iron when I was a teen. It was similar to what the dry cleaners use. A hot plate on top and a roller on the bottom. First the clothes were sprinkled with water using a pop bottle that had a cap full of holes. After sprinkling the clothes were folded over and rolled up. It helped get the wrinkles out if they were slightly damp. I ran the sheets through the iron until I ended up with a neatly folded and ironed rectangular shaped sheet, corner to corner. The shirts were easy and I always made sure my pants had a neat crease in the front. After all it was the 1950s.
With all of this said and done and you still want to call me an “old wash woman”, I don’t mind; it’s a respectable job.
* * *
A few thoughts:
Now that we and everybody else has nuclear devices, couldn’t a device also be created to neutralize a nuclear device? Sort of a matter versus anti-matter thing. Just wondering. If it is possible to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle, I hope we’re working on it because there’s people out there planning on using one against us.
The difference between a liberal and conservative lately seems to be that conservatives are asking the better questions and the liberals are calling them names such as hobbits, terrorist, and people who want to throw grandma off a cliff because they don’t know what else to do. Wasn’t something like that the title of a movie? Oh . . . it was a train.
So does all of that rhetoric help anything? Not unless they’re talking to dumb people. As for me, I can see through it. I’m sure there are some people out there who can’t or don’t want to.
Does any of this help the country? Hell no, but who cares anymore. Certainly they don’t. That’s why we have to fire as many of them next year as we can.
Shouldn’t we be concerned about people shooting our helicopters down in Afghanistan with surface to air missiles and more importantly, who is providing them? I’d bomb the hell out of any of those countries in the Middle East who is doing this to our guys.
Oh, I forgot, I would warn these counties in advance that the big ka-boom was coming.
Until the next time . . .