Thursday, May 15, 2008

Clean Living

My bedroom, circa 1967
I love a clean house. A clean, uncluttered, nice smelling, house. When I was a kid, it was required that we clean our bedrooms every Saturday morning. I hated the actual cleaning part, but when it was all over, the results made me feel good. The problem has always been how to get to the feeling good part without the work part.

Over the years I have had a few housekeepers. Even though it is expensive, I loved coming home to a clean house after the housekeeper had been there. My first cleaning lady was in Chicago. She was my next door neighbor, and she may have had an ulterior motive. Not knowing I was gay, she seemed to be very friendly, but she only charged me fifteen dollars so I didn't care what she thought.

When I moved to Florida, I hired a cleaning 'man' named Paul to clean my house. He was very thorough, and also economical. His only drawback was that he was clumsy, and often when I would return home after he had cleaned, I'd find something broken. That didn't bother me at all, mostly because I didn't really own any thing that was worth much.

I eventually had to find another housekeeper. The one I hired after Paul seemed okay, he even cleaned the inside of my refrigerator. Then one day he just disappeared. My next housekeeper followed the same route. He worked a couple of weeks and ' Poof ' he was gone. My final try at finding someone to keep my house clean was an older man named 'Willamina'. Willamina's problem, besides his name, was that he was an alcoholic. No matter what he was doing, at twelve noon when his favorite tavern opened, he would stop working and run off. It was more than once that I came home and found the house half cleaned, and the mop and bucket in the middle of the living room. I eventually had to fire him.

So for years now I have been cleaning my own home. I am kind of like Paul, the first cleaning man I had here in Florida. I am clumsy, I break things, and I am very economical..

7 comments:

  1. I remember the poster above your bed. Mom hated it and 'accidently' hooked a broomstick under it and tore the thing off the wall.
    you put up a poster from a Jefferson Airplane album up after that. It read "Bless its pointed little head"

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  2. Mom should have been more worried when I got into that psychedelic music.

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  3. I had a "black light" and BL poster in my room. It was a large poster of a cats face. I still have some of my records that I listened to in 1973 while mesmerized at the colors of those posters.

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  4. Did you look up to "Bonnie" of Bonnie & Clyde Bandits as a role model or was she the "Farah Fawcett" of your teenage years?

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  5. I liked the cars they drove in the movie. Luke Halpin was the 'Farah Fawcett' of my teenage years.

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  6. What, no guard rails on the bed?

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  7. Those guardrails come later on in life.

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