[As John Luc Picard used to say in Star Trek: "Captain's blog, supplemental" ... or something like that. A week has passed since Misti wrote this, and after struggling with new passwords and other issues caused by the crash of my hard drive, we are just now able to actually get back into our blog and, just perhaps, publish it. Just perhaps, because as part of the crash I lost iPhoto and, while I had the photos backed up, I must use a different program to try to get them onto the blog. As you read this you might also notice that Misti has set a new standard for writing that cannot be illustrated. So, I will weave in photos of our recent trip to Reeve and Melanie's ancient house in Arles, France (the Roman mosaic at the top is in the Arles museum). So imagine a Star Trek episode in which two unrelated realities become intertwined and move along the same timeline.]
March 4 -- Revelation! I’ve figured out why the Viennese and other
Europeans smoke and drink so much, sometimes smell of body odor, and refuse to
pick up the dog poop from the middle of the sidewalks. Laundry! They’re so
tired of the work required to wash and dry their clothes, they smoke and drink
to relax, sometimes wear dirty clothes (it can take days for some items to
dry), and simply don’t care if the public sidewalks are shitty – let somebody
else do it.
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| Reeve's Neighborhood, Arles |
Our laundry saga continues, and, yes, I know this is petty,
but missing in an expat’s life are opportunities to vent – which might also
explain the lack of dryers.
Three weeks after our washing machine died, I’m boiling
laundry in a kettle on the stove, which consists of two small burners and no
oven. I’m convinced the kitchen towels have become bacteria breeding grounds
and need to be sterilized.
Last week we were enjoying a long overdue visit with Reeve
and family, and an American friend suggested we take our laundry along for our
children to do in an ironic gesture.
But, since we had only a backpack each, and those backpacks were crowded
with as-yet-undelivered Christmas presents, no space remained for dirty
laundry. In addition, Arles is in
France. Reeve and family live in a 4-story, 17th century house/art
gallery/cave, and while they have a small washer, like us, they have no dryer.
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| Saint de la rondelle cassée |
After we returned, we got the news that the new washing
machine would be delivered on Wednesday. Ecstatic hallelujahs burst forth. The
machine was deposited right inside the front door, outside the bathroom. Jim muscled the machine into position and
hooked it up, and, just to be sure there was no international installation
confusion since the manual was in German, our landlady’s husband came by to
check on it. Good to go.
Digression. The complexity of languages here continues to
stupefy me. Despite being politically liberal, I mostly agree with the
typically conservative “English as an official language” approach in the U.S. More on that another time. On the washing
machine packaging these words appear: Lavabiancheria, Washing machine,
Waschmaschine, Machine a laver, Maquina de lavar roupa, Lavadora, Pralka,
Camasir Makinesi, and something that looks like MoIOMINHaa maIHHHaa (my
computer can’t handle whatever alphabet it is: Cyrillic? Greek? Phoenician??)
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| Keir and a French Cat |
Having owned many washing machines, we didn’t anticipate any
problems with our inaugural load. Jim put a reasonably small pile of bath
towels in the washer and turned it on, and we watched like small children
fascinated and delighted. Then, midway through the cycle, during a particularly
violent spin, the machine abruptly stopped and so did our breathing.
One common aspect of expat life is loss of status, in our
case, from homeowners to renters.
We like our landlady, the defense attorney, and we don’t
want to be a nuisance. Writing a note to her about a machine that was broken
less than 2 hours after it was installed was, take your pick: humiliating,
mortifying, embarrassing, horrifying.
Weeks ago, the furnace broke and we were without heat and hot water for
three days; luckily, it was a simple ignition fix. Shortly before that, the
faucet in the bathroom sink was continually dripping and despite Jim’s best
efforts to fix it, he couldn’t. That required the installation of a new faucet,
but because it wasn’t of a typical model, it had to be ordered, which required
more communication and more delay. In both cases, Frau P., who has far more
pressing matters to attend to such as defending accused murderers, was
understanding and helpful.
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| Melanie, Ocean, Reeve, in Marseille |
What we haven’t told her is that the relic of a vacuum
cleaner that came with the apartment broke three weeks ago, the shower hose
broke when we came back from France, the old toaster oven is working
erratically, and some of the windows messed up by the renovators still don’t
close. Three of four of those we’ll handle ourselves.
This is a beautiful, renovated, furnished apartment in an
old building, things happen. As homeowners ourselves whose renters back in the
States have had furnace problems, we understand that things breaking is part of
the joy of ownership. It appears, though, that European manufacturers have
learned what I considered the American art of planned obsolescence.
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| Karaoke Bar, "My Way," in French |
I just returned from meeting with my friend, Brigitte, an
inquisitive, intelligent woman of 27 whom I see every week, ostensibly to
practice my German but really just to engage in scintillating conversation in
English. She recently earned her MA in British lit and her British English is
nearly flawless. Between my observations and questions as a foreigner and her
insights and explanations as a native Wiener, we both come to a clearer
understanding of this place on the planet.
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| Arles Street |
Ordinarily, I drink green tea or coffee. Today I had a beer
because while I was writing earlier, I forgot about the kettle, which I had
inexplicably covered. It boiled over
(and over and over) and dark, soapy water was swirling around the kitchen
necessitating a quick mopping up with whatever towels were available. Now I
have more towels to wash and dry. See? Laundry drives you to drink.
I told Brigitte about our washing machine fiasco and she
sympathetically replied: Scheisse, Scheisse. I then asked Brigitte about
dryers. Her parents have never owned
one, and although there is one in the cellar of her apartment building, she
never uses it. Why not? “I don’t know. Tradition?” I wondered why I don’t see laundry hanging
out Viennese windows as it does in Marseilles and Arles (so colorful, so
lively) and she blanched. She said it is too cold but mostly, it seems, it is a
matter of modesty, which is ironic given the public displays of nudity and
lingerie that abound on posters and billboards in Vienna and the intriguing
array of sex toys displayed in store windows. She didn’t mention it, but I’ll ignore
the environmental impact argument.
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| Marseille Street |
I’ve hung up laundry in my lifetime. Those sunny afternoons
of hanging up damp clothes on the long wire lines at my grandma’s farm when my
grandma would identify the songbirds for me as we worked rank among my fond memories.
Our family of seven created a lot of laundry, all of which my mother did, and
although sometimes a portion of it would be hung on the more modern rotary
clothesline in our backyard, my mother no doubt was grateful on a daily basis
for the modern dryer. I know the smell
and stiffness of pillowcases dried in the open air. I’ve spent time wondering
why some people chose the wooden clothespins that look like primitive human
figures and others used the less-anthropomorphic spring-action variety. However, I’ve never spent so much time before
thinking so much about something so mundane.
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| Reeve, Ocean, Marseille Train |
As I’ve been hand wringing clothes again, one of my favorite
American authors has come to mind.
Tillie Olsen, author of the stunning short story, “As I Stand Here Ironing,”
and the novella, “Tell Me A Riddle,” was a Nebraskan, a high school dropout, a
union activist, a wife, and a mother of four daughters, who published her first
book when she was 50. Until then, she was too busy with the prosaic demands of
cooking, laundry, cleaning, child-rearing and near-poverty to express herself.
When
she finally had time to write, she wrote, "The habits of a lifetime when
everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken. Habits of years—response to others,
distractibility, responsibility for daily matters—stay with you. … The cost of
'discontinuity' is such a weight of things unsaid … that what should take
weeks, takes me months to write; what should take months, takes years."
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| Melanie, Ocean, their house and gallery |
Her nonfiction book, “Silences,” is an examination of the
creative costs of household and labor duties. How many creative works,
innovations, political interventions, flashes of brilliance -- particularly
those of women -- went unborn or unexpressed because of the demands of
domesticity? I think again of those
Peruvian women washing laundry in the river. Which of them might have been the
equivalent of Olsen, or even the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa?
And then a much better known American writer comes to mind,
one vaunted for his “courage” in forsaking civilization for Walden Pond,
Thoreau. While he was thinking deep thoughts about the simple life and being
visited routinely by Mrs. Emerson, guess how he did his laundry? He dropped it
off in Concord for his mother and sister to do.
The repair person is scheduled for Monday.
After a few minutes the novelty of the moment wore off and we
were absorbed into the film and lost in the story. Lillian Gish was remarkable. She heads out west, meets some bad guys, and
ends up in a cabin married to one of the lesser bad guys. “Why did you make me hate you?” she screams
in the form of a wailing accordion and strained clarinet. Two rivals for her affection shoot out the
eyes of a stuffed owl, and a woman who is jealous of her dresses out a full
side of beef hanging in the living room of her ramshackle cabin on the prairie. She glares at poor Lillian as she wipes the
bloody butcher knife across her apron. 
The Austrian woman then tried, but only got to two or
three. We then turned to flipping the
beer coasters up in the air, with the object being that they land on top of the
glass of Guinness. My skill at this game
apparently has faded, but Keir got six in a row. The woman across the way got one. 
