Joe does laundry

One day my thoughtful husband offered to do the laundry for me -- take a load off me, so to speak. Since he hasn't done any laundry in the almost two years we've been married, I felt that some training was necessary, and so we headed to the basement.

"This is the washer," I said, pointing to the appliance on the left.

He peered at it. "It doesn't say 'washer' anywhere."

"It says 'water' in several places. That's close enough. And the dryer" -- I motioned toward the appliance on the right -- "says 'dry' in several places."

He glanced from one to the other, then pointed to the washer. "So that's where the clothes go first?"

"Yes," I said. "First, though, we put the water and the detergent in."

"Wait!" he said. He trotted off and came back with a notepad and pen. "TOWELS -- WASHING" he wrote across the top of the pad. "Okay, can you start over?"

This was going to be a long process. Did I have time for this?

"This is a large load of towels, and the dial is already set for large," I began.

"How do I know how much is a large load?" he asked.

"Usually about one Moses basket of clothes is a large load," I said. The Moses basket is what we use for a laundry basket. Our stairwells are too narrow to allow passage of both a person and an average-size laundry basket at the same time, whereas the Moses basket, with its slim profile, easily fits. Plus, it looks better in the bedroom.

"What if I pack the towels down in the basket? Is that okay?" he wanted to know.

"No, you don't pack them in. That will be too many and they won't be able to move around and get clean."

"ONE LOOSELY LEVEL MOSES BASKET," he wrote.

"Can I put the towels in now?" he asked.

"No, first we have to put the water in. Here is where you set the water temperature," I said, and pointed to the dial.

"Why are there two temperatures together?" he demanded. " 'Hot/cold, warm/cold, cold/cold.' "

The first temperature is for washing; the second is for rinsing," I explained. "For towels we use the warm setting."

"W.T. -- W/C" he wrote.

"Are you going to remember what that means?" I said.

"Sure. 'Water temperature -- warm/cold,' " he rattled off.

"I mean will you remember the next time you look at these directions?"

He scribbled out "W/C" and wrote "WARM/COLD."

"Now," I said, "there are two main settings. Normal, and permanent press. For towels we use the normal setting."

"TOWELS NORMAL," he wrote.

"To start the water," I said, "you pull out the dial after you set it to normal."

He jotted this down. "Do we put the towels in yet?" he asked.

"First the detergent." I took it down from the shelf and let him get a good look at it.

"Where do I fill it to?" he asked as he peered in the small scoop.

I pointed to the first line. "Right here for an average load."

"CHEER UP TO LEVEL 1," he wrote.

I made a mental note to only buy Cheer.

"Now do we put the towels in?" he said.

"Yes, now."

He reached for the basket and then went back to his notepad. "PUT TOWELS IN WASHER," he wrote, then added, "(1 LEVEL MOSES BASKET)" in case he would forget to look at his earlier note.

I showed him how to arrange the towels evenly throughout the washer so they didn't get packed down. "This is so much work," he sighed.

"Tell me about it," I said.

Since our washer doesn't have a timer, I told him to set the timer upstairs for 35 minutes. "35, right on the nose? Not 34, or 38?" he asked.

We'll save the drying instructions for another day.

The art of folding sheets

I have come to accept that there are some things in life at which I will never be adept. Folding bedsheets is one of them.

It's not like defective sheet folding runs in my family. My mom and aunt, for instance, would do the army proud with their folded sheets. But no matter how much they tried to show me, and I tried to do what they were showing me, I could never get it quite right. I would even study diagrams in home magazines of how to fold sheets, but they only confused me more. The directions never seemed to go with the illustrations, and I needed about 50 more illustrations ("take one corner between thumb and forefinger, now take another corner between thumb and forefinger, now take another..."). The illustrations they gave were sort of like how-to-draw-a-clown-in-four-easy-strokes, where the first three illustrations have one simple stroke each: "Draw an egg shape. Now draw a stick coming down out of the egg shape. Now add two more sticks coming out of the first stick." And from that, you are supposed to get the complete clown shown in the fourth illustration, with a red nose and multicolored hair and enormous, sad lips. In the case of sheets, from a tumbled mass of cotton lying on the bed you are supposed to get a crisp, tightly folded set of sheets no more than an inch and a half high. Mine came out looking like cottage cheese with stripes.

Mostly I have avoided the problem altogether by putting the same sheets back on the bed every time I wash them. I have 11 sets of sheets I haven't used since the first printing of Heloise's Household Hints. Even my husband, who doesn't usually notice such domestic trivialities, will sometimes ask whether we have any other sheets. I am always vague in my answer. "Define have," I say.

I just assumed this was a problem most women have. After all, if magazines have to run little how-to's on the subject, complete with illustrations, then clearly this must be a difficult thing to achieve. I wondered, too, whether the fact that they never included decent illustrations meant that even the magazine people didn't know how to fold them. I decided I could lower my standards a bit.

Until one day I found a set of sheets that a friend of mine had folded after washing them for the first time. They were perfect. "I can't believe this!" I told her. "They look like they just came out of the bag! How do you do that?" Before she could answer, the obvious dawned on me.

"Ooooh" I said. "You're Inspector #32, aren't you?"

Making the switch

I never thought I'd see the day...I switched to fat-free milk.

I grew up on whole milk, basically because that was the choice back then. Now, of course, the very thought makes me want to gag. I don't remember transitioning to 2%, so it must not have been too painful. I was faithful to 2% for a long, long time. I felt virtuous for not having the whole stuff, and the 2% tasted great.

Then I got married. Since I bought the groceries, I still bought 2%. I started to feel a twinge of guilt that maybe I wasn't doing the best thing for us, but after all, it wasn't like it was whole milk. Then one day my husband accidentally brought home 1%. I looked at it through narrowed eyes, wondering how to handle this invader of our home. What if I drank it and hated it? Worse, what if I drank it and liked it? Would I turn into one of those lowfat people, always looking at labels? Would I become obsessed with converting all my favorite recipes into zero-fat, tasteless cardboard? Maybe I could just wait until Joe finished off that gallon of 1%, and I could go back to the real stuff.

My curiosity and thirst prevailed, and I drank the 1%. I didn't hate it, and I didn't become obsessed with ridding our house of fat.

When we moved, the new grocery store carried 1/2%. Wow! I thought. This incremental fat thing is really something. What's next? .33%? A half of one percent?

A curious thing happened. Once I got used to the 1/2%, when Joe would accidentally buy the 1%, instead of thinking it was a yummy treat, I would think...I used to drink this? Willingly? Ugh.

I imagined living out the rest of my days contentedly drinking 1/2%. There halted my gradual descent in milk fat. I would never go lower. That blue stuff? I would never touch that. That isn't even really milk, it's...I don't know what it is, but it's not milk. Milk is white, and thick. Not runny. Not blue. Not so thin you can see the bottom of your cereal bowl through it.

But one day, lacking suitable reading material to keep me entertained while I ate my cereal, I happened to look at the label on the milk. Splots of milk landed on the table when I dropped my spoon into the bowl. What?? Even a teeny tiny, half percent of milk fat has saturated fat?? And not such a teeny tiny amount of it, either. I thought milk was supposed to be good for you!

Now I had a real dilemma. My conscience would no longer let me continue bringing that milk into our home now that I was enlightened as to the real nature of what I'd assumed was a healthy food. But could I do the blue stuff? And what would Joe say? In general he eats and drinks so fast that he doesn't really taste what he's consuming, but this was such a drastic move, I knew I had to consult him. I approached the subject with all the solemnity of bringing up a change in family status, and braced myself for a storm of protest.

"Honey, what would you think about switching to fat-free milk?"

He looked at me. "That's all I used to drink before we got married."

Another blow. Here I had thought he had always been in the fat camp with me, and now I realized I had dragged him down. No more excuses now.

The next time I went to the store for milk, I paused in front of the dairy case, feeling the significance of the occasion. I looked apologetically at the 1/2% and reached for the skim. I had expected it to somehow feel foreign, but it fit well in my hand. The other groceries welcomed it into the cart, as if they had been waiting for it for a very long time. But some were a little nervous. The cheese, the sour cream, the cottage cheese -- all sensed that they might be the next to be, well, down-fatted.

Grocery store woes

I was pleased to find that my new grocery store offered carts in two sizes. I often didn't need the large one, and the smaller one felt like driving a sports car instead of a behemoth van. I could zip around corners in the bakery faster, without tipping over the displays, and I could beat out the behemoths to the frozen section before the last gallon of ultra-rich Edy's ice cream on sale disappeared. But one day, when they were all out of smaller carts and I had to settle for the behemoth, I discovered another reason for preferring the smaller ones: the larger ones do not fit through the check-out lanes.

They must have built the lanes first, cramming a bunch of them in (I don't know why, since all 40 are never open at the same time anyway), and then realized that the carts didn't fit. Instead of tearing out the lanes and making them wider, they ordered new carts in a smaller size. "But if we only offer the small carts," they thought, "our customers won't buy as much and we won't be able to pay for all these new carts. We'd better keep the large carts, too."

So you squeeze. The oversized cart budges a little. You squeeze some more. It budges some more. You take a deep breath, grit your teeth, and concentrate. You strain at the cart and it ever so slowly grinds and screeches through the lane, shaking the displays on either side. Candy and magazines spill onto the belt, the floor, your cart. You need one final push. You back up and run with all your might at the cart, shoving it through until it finally emerges at the other end, like a difficult birth, and other shoppers begin clapping. And when the cashier asks if you need help taking your groceries to the car, you gratefully load them in the waiting carrier's arms, climb in the cart, and wait for him to push you to your car.

Making friends

I read that you don't really make many new friends after you turn 40. The ones you have before then are pretty much it for the rest of your life.

"We'd better get busy," I said to my husband. "We don't have much time to find some new friends."

"I have more time than you," he said. "Three years more, in fact."

I ignored this.

"You made a friend down the street already this year," he reminded me.

"That's one friend," I said. "I'll need a lot more than that to get me through retirement, if I'm not going to make any new friends after I'm 40."

"Well, how did you meet her?" he asked.

"At that neighborhood barbecue last fall."

"Well, there you go. We'll have another barbecue, you can meet another new person, and presto! you'll double your number of new friends."

"You can't have a barbecue in February," I pointed out.

"So, plan one for the summer," he said logically. He always has something logical to say.

"But summer will be too late!" I wailed. "I'll be 40 by then! No one new will want to sit by me or talk to me. 'Well, she had her chance,' they'll say. 'Too bad she had to have a birthday.' "

I had a new thought. "You won't be 40 for a while yet. How about if you make friends with a nice guy who has a nice wife, and I can be friends with her."

"But I don't like meeting new people," he said.

"It's not like you have to like the guy. It's the wife we're interested in here. And make sure she's under 40. If we're both over, it won't work."

Morning people

My husband's family are Morning People. When we stay with my in-laws, the phone begins ringing at 5:30 every morning. One by one, the siblings call to inquire how everyone slept, who snored, and whether there is anything new since 9:00 the night before, when they last called. As one sibling is talking with my in-laws, the others are all calling each other to talk about what my in-laws said to them, and so they all have to call back again to talk about what the others all discussed. With four siblings, this can go on all morning.

One morning my husband's parents were trying to get us up for breakfast. They tried everything. A juicy description of the food. Pleadings. The smell of fresh coffee. Threats that they were going to eat everything and there wouldn't be any for us. Then it was quiet for a few minutes, and I thought they had given up. But they had just gone for fresh ammunition.

"Are they playing maracas?" I said.

We collapsed in laughter, then yelled that we were coming.

"Never mind now," my father-in-law said. "It's almost time for lunch."

Why I have poor memory

I have found a scapegoat for my poor memory. According to researchers in psychology, a person’s working memory consists of several components, all of which may not be located in the same country. No, actually, these components are called a central executive and three “slave systems.”

Which perfectly explains why I so often forget things. My slaves are disobeying the central executive!

"Working memory" is the new term for what we used to call short-term memory. "Working memory" is an oxymoron for me, as my memory works about as often as it doesn't. But the new term is shorter and therefore easier to remember, and that way it puts less stress on the central executive, which has a hard enough time trying to corral those three slaves and get some decent work out of them.

Now where was I? Oh, yes.

Each slave supposedly has its own area to take care of. One rehearses verbal information in a continual loop, for instance when you are at the grocery store and you were too proud of your memory to write down what you needed to get, so you keep repeating your list of items to yourself: "Bananas, lunchmeat, milk...bananas, lunchmeat, milk...bananas...." Another slave is supposed to help you with visual or spatial tasks, like remembering the color and make of the car that just hit yours in the parking lot or judging how fast another grocery cart aiming toward the meat counter is moving and whether you can make it there faster. This slave system also plans spatial movements. In my brain, this slave frequently disobeys orders. For instance, say my body heads toward the kitchen for a snack. The central executive will order this slave to remember that the body is heading toward a healthy snack, say, carrots, but the slave will reinterpret this and whisper something else entirely to the body -- say, a brownie. And of course, the body, which has no short-term/working memory of its own, moves toward the last thing ordered. So you can see how insidious these slave systems can be.

The third slave system, which was "discovered" much more recently than the first two -- which makes you wonder how much work it really does if no one knew it was there -- supposedly coordinates the functioning of the other two. This is beginning to sound like a junior manager to me. It also takes care of chronological ordering, like helping you remember to put the soup in the pan AFTER you open the can.

And the poor central executive is left with the task of making sure everyone else performs their tasks, and it is also supposed to make sure the slaves pay attention to important information and forget irrelevant information. Clearly this process has broken down somewhere along the line in my own brain. I remember the birthdays of people I went to elementary school with -- which means this information passed the slave gatekeepers and entered my long-term memory a long time ago -- but I cannot remember my point here, or how I was going to end this article. Maybe I'll go have some carrots.