Dear Abby – I Miss You

 

Ten years ago in this space, I mourned the loss of Dear Abby. Abigail Van Buren had died at age 94. I felt like a wise old member of the family had passed on – similar to the way I felt the day Erma Bombeck passed … the day the laughter died.

Like everyone else, I met both those ladies in my morning newspaper. Unlike most people, I was privileged to meet Abigail van Buren when I was at work.

I read Dear Abby daily, whether I lived in Boston, New York or San Diego. Sometimes, she was like a second mother, addressing some of the sticky subjects I didn’t dare talk about with my mother. Abby said no kisses on first dates and probably not the second. I wasn’t taking chances if Abby said no. Third dates were probably safe, but just one, “Don’t get carried away.” Who would talk to their mother about kissing, let alone getting carried away? I might have been dumb, but I wasn’t stupid.

Looking back on Abby’s advice, I realize her guidance actually did keep me from being stupid. She wrote the rules of boy/girl relationships and she had good advice about girls’ friendships, especially when teenage cattiness sometimes reared its ugly head. I learned from Abby that pettiness and jealousy were wasted emotions.

Abigail Van Buren, as most people know, was her pseudonym. Abby’s real name was Pauline Phillips. She chose the name Van Buren from the president because she thought it sounded distinguished and Abigail came from the bible – a woman who dispensed advice to kings. 

Pauline Phillips, for all her celebrity and influence, didn’t flaunt her position. The day I met Abby, I was working a flight from Chicago to San Francisco. Flight crews were briefed in operations if we had a celebrity onboard, receiving paperwork detailing name, seat number and any special requirements. We were not told to expect Abigail Van Buren. 

During boarding, a petite, elegant woman came through the door with a traveling companion. This young woman was dragging a large canvas duffle bag which we stored in the closet. The name tag pinned to seat 3A, by the window read “Mrs. Phillips.” We had no idea who Mrs. Phillips was, but she was impossible to ignore. Her elegant clothes and stunning jewelry spoke of her affluence, but her engaging smile and manner of speaking spoke of her self-confidence, despite a soft lisp. Short in stature, she was every inch a lady. 

Although we served cocktails and an elaborate dinner, Mrs. Phillips didn’t drink, ate sparingly and asked sweetly if she might be able to use the first-class lounge as she had some paperwork to do. Wow, did she ever.

The companion turned out to be her secretary. She retrieved the duffle bag, they spread out, and went to work. The bag was full of hundreds of letters. It wasn’t until I saw one of the envelopes that I realized who she was. Looking over her little half glasses, she admitted she was Abby and she indulged me a few questions. Yes, she actually received many thousands of letters daily. She proudly told me that every letter was read, although the volume required a staff that edited them for her … she only read hundreds each day. Both ladies were sorting them into piles by category – lovelorn, in-laws, money problems, sex, illness, aging, family infighting, child raising, etc., etc.

As they busily made notes on the margins, I overheard Abby tell her assistant to put a call notation on one letter. Through the rest of the flight, I watched that pile grow. She commented that one particular letter should go to the top of the pile because she feared for his depression, his life. Mrs. Phillips may have started her career as a common-sense housewife, but she grew into a paragon of caring, doing the right thing. She told me she called on experts around the country for professional advice. She was the real deal. 

Abby worked through descent and landing, packing up when we arrived at the gate. She warmly took my hand at the door, genuinely thanked me, and headed up the jet bridge, the secretary and duffle bag in her wake.

After that, any time she appeared on television, I watched – she was also quick-witted and funny. As she aged, she grew more open-minded, more tolerant, but still retained her moral rudder, her common sense. Sometimes her answer was simply, “Grow up.” She didn’t tolerate fools gladly.

She wrote for over 30 years, until Alzheimer’s invaded her good mind. I couldn’t help but think of the thousands of lives that mind had coached through the years.

Thank you, Abby, good friend, for your humor, your humanity. And just as you lightened up as you aged, I want you to know that in my widowed sixties, I kissed on the second date. I knew you’d approve.

 

 

 

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Can you come for supper?

 

Can you come for supper?

            Weeknights at our house, Jeopardy! plays during supper. It’s a duet that works for us, and I think Dear Richard looks forward to the pairing as much as I do.

Our little tray tables in the den get a lot of use. Mine collapsed recently, dumping my entire pot roast dinner, gravy and all, upside down on the white carpet. My verbiage wasn’t ladylike, but the carpet cleaner was very happy to talk to me the next day… mere weeks after our last holiday cleanup.

It’s funny how you slip into a routine like our tray table suppers. After we married eight years ago, we ate our evening meal at the kitchen table. It was all very civilized, with tablecloth, cloth napkins, and an occasional candle. Civilization lasted almost two weeks. Soon, we were chowing down in the den with paper napkins. A few weeks more – straight to paper towels. Hey, they cover about the same space. That’s our every night supper routine.

Dinner, however is a different matter. When we have visiting family or invited guests, we eat in the dining room. That’s when we rise up from the paper towels, haul out the cloth napkins and “dine.” I mean, the room name says Dining, right?

When I was a kid, supper was the evening meal at home. Dinner was the big meal on Sunday and holidays. Have you ever heard of Thanksgiving supper? Me neither.

 But there’s something about breaking out the vino that elevates supper into dinner. Now I’m not saying that a decent Cabernet transforms a cheeseburger to gourmet. I know better. When I was still single, I learned that Chardonnay is not an enhanced “pairing” with lazy-supper Cheerios – even when you add blueberries.

But the suppertime clinking of wineglasses transports an ordinary meal into dinner. A little bit of fermented grape juice makes everything better somehow – the chit-chat, the laughter, and the baby back ribs that made it out of the freezer after 11 months. Everyone relaxes more than usual – straight through to dessert. By then, the wine bottle is being passed around for “just one more inch – the final splash.”

Last week our tableful of weeknight guests inched our way through three bottles of Montepulciano – and I never once tasted any freezer burn on the ribs. Yup, it was just a weeknight supper, Caesar salad and ribs. But we wined and dined as if it were duck a l’orange with a fig reduction, on a Saturday night.

The next evening it was back to an ordinary meal in the den.

For example, we had breakfast for supper last night. Maybe once a month, when my schedule gets cramped or my imagination is as empty as the meat drawer in the fridge, we have some form of breakfast. Last night, I enticed him not with bacon and eggs-over-easy, but with Eggs Benedict. The light in his eyes indicated that this was a worthy substitute for pork chops. It’s hard to say “we dined” when the entrée is ham on an English muffin. But when the muffin halves are topped with pillowy poached eggs, napped with homemade hollandaise, it brings forth a “good dinner” comment from the only critic who mattered.

Even after eight years, Dear Richard is still saying, “How come we’ve never had this before?” Usually, it’s a plateful of a long-forgotten dish I was craving, like chicken Marsala. Turns out, most of my long-ago suppers were never in Richard’s long-ago menu, so we are still in the discovery stages of our marriage. You find excitement where you can these days.

Thankfully, we are not locked into a routine. When I think back to my childhood, I can remember families who ate exactly the same seven meals every week. Meatloaf every Monday. Tuna noodle casserole every Friday, without fail. Roast chicken was for Sunday. You could smell it down the street walking home from church.

Every Wednesday, our Italian neighbors had spaghetti and meatballs. Tuesdays, our Greek friends had avgolemono – that heavenly chicken, lemon, and rice soup. Mrs. Nicholas probably made it from the leftover Sunday chicken. Every Tuesday.

Our only ritual supper was frankfurters, beans and brown bread on Saturday night– an old New England custom. I explained this wee bit of deliciosity to Dear Richard, but he remained unconvinced. “That doesn’t sound like supper to me,” he said.

Maybe it’s all just semantics. If the answer to “What are we eating tonight?” is “tuna noodle casserole,” that’s supper. And it comes with Jeopardy!

If the answer to “Wanna go out tonight?” is “You betcha,” that’s dinner. And it comes with a check. The only jeopardy is to your wallet.

But if it’s Friday night, and you’re hungry, either answer is a win/win. I recommend a Sauvignon Blanc with the tuna noodle casserole.

 

 

Hung Out to Dry

 

 

 

Hung Out to Dry

I love my clothes dryer.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the smell of fresh clothes hung outdoors, but in my fast-paced life that aroma is a distant memory. I’m not sure, but I don’t think I have many friends today with a clothesline. I’d be happy if spray starch came in that outdoorsy aroma, but then again, I’d have to use an iron to get the effect. 

Someone once told me that when I hear the comment “They don’t make things like they used to,” that the proper response often should be “Thank God.” Laundry is one of those subjects. I repeat, I love my dryer, but then again, I also love its good buddy, the automatic washer. I’m old enough to remember its predecessor and we’ve come a long way, baby.

My mom worked two jobs while I was growing up. On Saturdays she only worked at night so Saturday morning began our laundry day.

Always a slug-a-bed, I would awaken late to the sound of her wheeling the squeaky, big-tubbed machine down the back hall.  She had to move the kitchen table to maneuver it next to the sink then fill it with a hose attached to the faucet. The hose was formed into a hard hook at one end to hang on the side of the tub as it filled. I often think of that today as I pull my kitchen faucet out to rinse the sink. 

Having already lit the water heater while perking her first cup of coffee, Mom filled the washer with the first all-white load in the hottest water possible. Our two beds, towels and underwear required two white loads which she’d wash for about twelve or fifteen minutes each. Steam would be rising from the fat tub as I‘d stumble into the kitchen, rubbing my eyes and yawning.  She always grinned, chirping, “Well, good morning merry sunshine, and how are you today?” 

“Mornin’” I’d murmur, slumping into a chair in the tiny, cramped kitchen. Mom made breakfast between loads and I’d gradually come alive over my eggs to the rhythm of the agitator beating the clothes clean. It all sounded like the washday blues to me. But Mom never complained as she worked the clothes through the wringer, into the deep sink for rinsing, back through the wringer and kerplunk, into the laundry basket. While the next load washed, she headed down the back hall to hang the first basketful.

Our apartment was on the second floor of a rambling old house with a family of rambunctious boys downstairs. Their mother hung her laundry on a series of clotheslines set in one corner of the big, square backyard. Bea did her huge laundry on Mondays like most stay-at-home mothers. Not having that luxury, my mother hung our wash on a pulley line that ran from our upstairs hall window to the large pear tree across the yard. And during the school year, Saturday was the day the Flynn boys wanted to play in the backyard, preferably baseball. Our clean, wet sheets cut diagonally through the infield – the pear tree was first base. The boys grumbled, but since their mother wasn’t sympathetic, they batted balls into the towels and jumped high trying to slap the bottom of the sheets. This usually lasted only until my mother appeared again at the upstairs window.

The rattley, old window pulled down from the top; our bag of clothespins hung nearby. Mom would pick each wet item out of the basket, snapping it hard to release the wrinkles from the wringer, and lean out the window to hang it.  Sheets took more than two clothespins and I can still picture her with a few in her mouth while she struggled to keep the sheets from hitting the side of the house.  She hung everything as close together as possible to conserve space then reel the line out after each addition.  The line sagged heavier, creaking with each added wash load, until the first item hit the pulley at the pear tree.  I do remember that once or twice through the years, the clothesline gave up the ghost, snapping and dropping Mom's entire washday onto the ground. The landlord grumbled from his ladder as he replaced it, but maybe not as much as my overworked mother redoing her laundry.

One of my early jobs was bringing in the dry wash. I wasn’t tall enough at age eight to lean out the high open window so I stood on a box and reached out. I can still feel the top of the window frame digging into my armpits while I balanced and stretched at the same time. The clothesline sagged much less when everything was dry, light enough that I could manage to tug the line in. I don’t remember when everything got folded, but I do remember that crisp aroma as the dishtowels and my undershirts came in through the window. Once in a while my chore was a race with dark rain clouds and I can still put the smell of impending showers and fresh clothes together in my memory. 

As I grew older, I helped Mom by hanging the clothes out, learning from watching her methods. There was, however, no lesson for frozen laundry.  My fingers numbed quickly hanging the wet clothes into the icy air wind.  Harvesting them was only a little better.  It turned out that leaving them until the warmest part of the afternoon helped a bit, but a dress seemingly made of frozen wood is hard to pull in through an overhead window.  Like I said, I dearly love my dryer.

On some of those frigid days, only necessary items were washed.  Our underwear went onto a drying rack in the tub and was spread on towels draped over the radiators.  No Chinese laundry ever smelled any better than our house on a February Saturday.

In those days, dry cleaners weren’t even discussed as a possibility.  My mother washed everything, wool skirts, wool sweaters and cotton dresses which had at least a thousand pleats, all to be set by hand at the ironing board.  Time was such a premium in our household that sometimes, when the sprinkled, rolled clothes couldn’t be ironed before they’d mold, they went into the freezer to await processing. 

As Mom worked more hours, I gradually learned to iron.  My mind has blocked out the scorching accidents and the mistakes I made melting the early synthetics.  I think I can still smell that memory too.  Did I mention that I love my dryer? … especially now as the cotton/poly blends and knits pop put wrinkle free.

            My mother, who today does more laundry than any single human I have ever known, has one of those nifty stackable units, washer on the bottom, dryer on the top.  And although she, too, loves the fresh, outdoorsy aroma and still hangs her personals on a wooden rack in the tub, I know she wouldn’t trade for a clothesline.  She’s a smart woman with her priorities right - she also loves her dryer.  For such a small family, our affections run deep.