-by Frank Macdonald
Occasionally, circumstances have a way of throwing you back years or decades into the primitive period of your younger self. Obviously, this thought occurs because I am currently going through one of those moments, if a moment can last weeks.
We went through a bitter spell of winter a while back, and for two days the hot water line to my kitchen tap was frozen solid. I knew the pipe hadn’t burst because my water meter wasn’t shovelling loonies from my bank account to the County. But the risk of too much frost lingered, feeding off a belly full of ulcers.
The good news was that in the early morning hours of a sleepless night, while I sat at the table playing online cribbage, I heard the gush for which I had been praying. My hot water was back home, none the worse for taking a couple of days off to dress up as a solid chunk of ice, its way of playing head games with me.
There is a time, in every bachelor’s life, when he knows he could have written Kris Kristofferson’s famous line, “I fumbled in my closet through my clothes and found my cleanest dirty shirt…”
Third time through, and there’s no fourth wearing, not without consulting a laundromat. Such was the state I found my own clothes in. Fortunately, I own a washer and a dryer. Filled the tub with my laundry, added the soap, and flicked the switch that said “GO!” Except it didn’t go.
Several months earlier, I had contacted a washing machine technician who came to the house, examined my machine as though he was a doctor. Even without the X-rays and biopsies I could tell the news wasn’t good.
The replacement part I needed would cost hundreds of dollars. “Hardly worth it for an old machine like this.”
“Old!” I said defensively. “We bought it brand new.”
“When? 30, 40 years ago?”
“So the warranty would be expired?”
“The company is expired,” he informed me. But he did show me a way to trick my washing machine into thinking it still worked, adding that that method would last a while but…
Yet the dryer on the machine was behaving like it had found the Fountain of Youth. So for the next couple of years, my laundries were handled gingerly and tenderly, always rewarding me with clean, dry clothes. Until last week…
I loaded up the washer, added the soap, and as I mentioned earlier, nothing. My own analysis was that the copper pipe from the hot water tank to the washing machine was frozen. The bitter cold remained like an unwanted house guest. When the temperature touched zero, I tried again, certain that the hot water would have broken through the clog of ice to tackle my cleanest dirty shirt. Nothing.
I finally had to concede that the end had come for half my washer and dryer. There is a laundromat, but it so cold out, and besides, my dryer still worked. I have a double sink in the kitchen. Filled one with hot water and the second with rinse water. I could do what the washing machine had been doing. That was because the machine was built before Artificial Intelligence began its humiliation of the human species.
I had two pairs of jeans to wash, which I did, perhaps not to professional or washing machine standards, but I washed them. Then I had to wring them by hand. It would be easier to strangle a Brahman bull than wring water out of blue jeans. I did what I could and decided to let the dryer do the rest. I also decided that during my next laundry, I would wear my blue jeans into the shower, then let them drip dry. The t-shirts and socks and shirts and underwear were much easier to handle, and having the dryer still on my side of this domestic chore made it that much easier.
Oh, so very, very much easier, I thought as I looked out the window into a yard buried in billows of snow, and frost trying to attach itself to the window.
I remembered when, a time long before the dryer, my aunt Lila would be out in a bitter winter wind, mouthful of clothes pins, attaching my wet jeans and the rest of my wardrobe, and my uncle’s and her own, to a fifty foot length of clothes line. We watched and drank tea, acknowledging that culturally and genetically that there was nothing we could do. This was women’s work. The laundry would hang out there ’til dusk, when I would then be dispatched to bring in the clothes. (In the dark so none of the guys could see me!)
This was not an easy task. I had a basket to fold the clothes into, but winter had other ideas. You didn’t fold the clothes, you broke them into frozen pieces and stuffed them into the basket. Wrestling with long johns that were well into rigour mortis at that point was a feat.
Oh, and the feet! The price of rescuing the clothes from their death sentence of hanging on the line, could cost a frost-bitten toe or two. Then standing around a roaring Warm Morning stove, I would watch my aunt’s stove-heated iron perform a miracle of thawing. She could have brought a Mammoth back to life out of the permafrost with that iron.
It is still the dead of winter, but I recognize that I am going to need to replace my half-broken washer with something so new it probably has AI aspects to it to underscore my mechanical ignorance, which is the only reason AI exists. But if it can get some freshness back into my cleanest dirty shirt, it will discover I am a man of forgiveness.