Open Mike: Washing Machines (OOT*)

[Comments have been added, Thurs. 12:30 p.m. EST]

We've been talking about riches these past few days. And everybody has different ideas about money. The way I've always thought about wealth in my own life is that it gets me back to zero. That is, being prosperous is not actually a very good source of rewards; what it's really good for is removing the problems. Too much below the zero line, and I'm in a state of deficiency, where problems proliferate because I don't have the wherewithal to get them solved. If you've ever been poor, think of all the problems and headaches you experienced just because you couldn't afford a reliable automobile. It can even create minor crises, for instance when you're in dire need of a large repair you can't afford, or if you get in an accident when you don't have insurance. If you're prosperous, your car always works, your maintenance costs are predictable, everything's all insured and checked and inspected, you never worry about gas money, and you might even have a backup car in case anything does go wrong. It "nulls out" all the car problems. Gets you back to even. The car is just there, at your service.

As another example, I sometimes think of my history with...um, washing machines. (You can probably already tell this is going to be the weirdest post I ever wrote, but hey, it's a blog. If you don't like it, you can wait till Friday.)

When I was a boy, here's how clothing got washed: I dropped my dirty clothes on the floor of my bedroom and they disappeared. Some time after that, they reappeared, washed, dried, and neatly folded, in the drawer of my dresser. This happened invisibly, when I was at school. The agent of this routine miraculous transformation was Emmie, our sixtysomething spinster housekeeper of German descent. And this, by the way, is the optimum method for getting one's laundry done. It's ideal, not to mention lovely, and I wish I had appreciated it more.

The part about the bedroom floor was me, though. I have a very vague memory of a hamper in the upstairs hall that I was supposed to throw my dirty laundry into. But I don't think I very often did. Emmie didn't seem to resent having to pick my laundry off the floor; Emmie didn't seem to resent anything.

Start-stop
Emmie had two peculiarities I remember above all. One was that every now and then, as she worked, she would break into song. But it was always the same song, and she sang only one line of it: "Around—the world—in eigh-ty days...." Next, as if she had forgotten the words, she would continue with "ta-tah-tah-ta, ta-tah-tah-ta...." Then she would hum a few more bars softly and fall silent. A few moments or minutes would pass and she'd start up again, singing the same snippet again, exactly the same way. I probably heard her do that eight hundred times, or twice that.

The other odd thing was the way she drove her car—by repeatedly flooring the accelerator and then letting up off the pedal completely and coasting. So if the speed limit was 25, like it was in our neighborhood, she'd accelerate to 30, drift down to 20, then accelerate to 30 again. When I dawdled in the morning and missed the school bus, sometimes Emmie helped my mother by driving me to school. Accelerate, coast. Accelerate, coast. It's not like the car jumped ahead when it was floored. Her car, an inexpensive American hardtop coupe of a bland greenish color with a vinyl roof, probably had less than 90 horsepower and a zero-to-60 time in the high teens. Steadily holding delicate middling positions of the accelerator, however, was beyond her—when I goaded her into trying it, she just held the pedal down too long and we ended up careening down the leafy, lazy roads of the sleepy suburb of Bayside at fifty miles an hour! Which alarmed us both. Although the subtleties of Emmie's adult psychology were no doubt beyond my ken at the time, I was a bright enough child, and it did occur to me that she would continue to be fine with her odd style of driving so long as she never had to pilot too powerful a car.

It was only two miles, but it was during these trips to school that I pried her for details of her life. (Curiosity has always been one of my main characteristics.) Emmie's story, as far as I ever knew it, was that she was the daughter who had stayed home to care for her elderly parents, which she had done dutifully and without complaint. Her immigrant parents (Milwaukee was settled largely by Germans) had spoken little English, so she translated for them as well. There had been suitors for her, once upon a time, one in particular whom she honored in memory, but the complications of her familial duties had discouraged him. The problem with the arrangement was that, with her parents gone to their reward and Emmie's obligations fulfilled, she herself was left alone in her own old age. (I resolved at age ten not to end up like that, although I have.)

After my parents separated, it became my job to do my own laundry. I can't complain about that, because it's a basic life skill any young person of either sex should learn. At least the respective laundry machines at Mom's house and Dad's house were convenient and private, and supplies and maintenance were paid for out of my parents' pockets rather than mine. Again, no appreciation from me. Laundry was a chore and chores an annoyance.

After that, I moved to the Corcoran School of Art's "dorm," so called, a small brownstone apartment building in the Dupont Circle area of D.C. The laundry machines were just outside the door of my unit, which was convenient, but they were often in use, night or day, and at night the noise of the machines and people's comings and goings fractured my sleep.

Then I moved to a larger apartment building in Georgetown. We tenants weren't allowed to have laundry machines in our units—supposedly because of the risk of flooding, but also probably because the coin-op machines in the ancient dank basement were another source of income for the landlord. Those machines were dirty and sluggish, and took a lot of quarters—you had to run the dryers twice to have any hope of getting everything dry. If you abandoned your stuff for even a few hours it would be removed and set aside by some other tenant, some of whom would just pile your clothes on the floor, which looked like it had not been cleaned since maybe the Truman administration.

Stop, thief!
I was never a clothes horse except for a brief period of about three years in my mid-teens. If pictures from that period are any indication, that did not go well. So I've never owned much in the way of clothing, and what I do own tends to be utilitarian—I got through the entire George W. Bush administration with four identical pairs of black jeans. But I never learned the value of even basic clothing until I had some stolen from that apartment building in Georgetown.

The basement was what's called a "walk-out" type, and it got a lot of walk-through traffic because the basement door was the entrance from the back parking lot. And there was a band of homeless people in the "park" you had to be careful of. The park was actually not a park—it was the oldest Black graveyard in D.C., for the leaders and well-to-do of the Black community in the 1700s and 1800s. But at some point all the headstones had been shoved into the bushes and into the little gully, to clear the land for picnic tables and games of Frisbee (which I considered to be beyond disrespectful—let's not get me started on that topic). Halfway down the slope to Rock Creek was a crypt, a small stone room dug into the hillside. It was where the caskets of the dead had been temporarily stored during Winters when the ground in the cemetery was too frozen to dig. The crypt was the headquarters of the shadowy and shady homeless bunch, and you had to be cautious around it. I only peeked into it once, during the day, when its denizens were out panhandling, procuring their poisons of preference, thieving, or doing whatever they did.

I made the mistake of leaving a bag of clean laundry in the basement, because I was on my way out and too lazy to take it back upstairs. And then, unfortunately, I forgot about it. For a whole day or maybe even two. Bad move. The door to the parking lot was never locked. My bag got stolen. I had never thought twice about the cost of clothing until I lost that whole heap of it during a time when money was tight! Shirts, $20, jeans, $25, and so on—the replacement cost of that single bag of vanished laundry was more than $200. Painful.

Next I moved to a luxury apartment in Laurel, Maryland, and things started looking up. That was in my professional photographer period, so I had some money finally**. The apartment had a small utility room with laundry hookups just off the kitchen, and I splurged for a basic top-loading washer-dryer set in stylish avocado green. That was a luxury, too—my machines were private, proximate, shiny and new, needed no quarters, and they worked just like they were supposed to. And there you have it—back to zero! No more problems with laundry. Nothing could go wrong from there on out, right?

Except that a year later Xander was born and we moved to Chicago. And that's where I hit the nadir, laundry-wise. I had paid to move my still-fairly-new machines from Maryland, but I couldn't use them in the unit. So while my still all-but-new washer and dryer sat unused in storage in the basement of the building across the courtyard, mocking me, I had to take all our laundry five miles away to a laundromat and sit there and wait till it was done. It sucked up a lot of time, and it was vaguely humiliating in some undefined way, but let's look on the bright side—I got a lot of reading done. Xander, who was six months old, slept beside my chair in his handy detachable carseat basket. It was the least convenient way of getting laundry done I had ever experienced. I had certainly gone a long way down from the days of Emmie. That avocado-green washing machine and dryer had to be left behind when I moved again, and by the time I went back to get them they had vanished. Back below zero again.

Beautiful girl
This is getting longer than it is interesting. So, long story short, unless it's already too late for that: things are getting better now. Here in Western New York we have a large Mennonite community, and for an oh-so-short time a couple of years back I hired a beautiful young Mennonite housekeeper (or cleaning lady or maid or whatever you want to call it) named Jen Zeiset. And for that short period I actually did make it full circle back to the era of Emmie. Jen came once a week for maybe half a year or so. She didn't just help out; she enjoyed domestic work and had a gift for it. She worked like there was a contest on, wouldn't take breaks even when I encouraged her to, and did things better than I thought they could be done. She did all the laundry and folded it beautifully and returned it to the drawers. (To answer your question, no—I have matured into an orderly and dignified old fart, so I don't drop my undies on the floor any more.)

That's what affluence is for, the way I look at it. It alleviates the mundane, quotidian problems of life. You never have to cart the laundry to the Laun-Dro-Mat and stop for a roll of quarters along the way.

Alas, I'm back to shifting for myself. Mennonite girls, I'm told, only work outside the home until they start their own families. I assumed I might have Jen for two years, because she was only 18 when I hired her and Mennonite women typically marry at around 20, but no such luck: she married her beau Cody that very year and moved away to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where his business is. I wish I'd had to courage to ask her if I could take her portrait—she really was an uncommonly beautiful young woman, slender and demure in her cap and long dress. Smart and decent, too. It's no wonder she got taken early in the draft, if that's not too crass a way to put it. Cody was reportedly pretty head-over-heels for young Jen. According to her mother.

But we were talking about riches: and here's what really makes you rich. Not just to get back to zero, the point where a lack of money is no longer causing any problems: but to appreciate it. This is really where the satisfaction comes from, if you ask me.

It's the difference between Jen and Emmie. I took Emmie for granted; but after years of annoyances with the quotidian task of getting my clothes clean, every time I opened a drawer to find Jen's stacks of crisply folded clean shirts...well, I felt a flush of satisfaction, pleasure, and gratitude. Each time. I suppose rich people will pooh-pooh the idea that periods of poverty have anything to do with the enjoyment of wealth, and I can't speak for others, but I will claim that it sweetens the simple fruits of prosperity to have lived without them. In the way that hunger increases the satisfaction of a simple but excellent meal.

Searching for home
Oh, and by the way—my conclusion about Emmie's song was not that she was simple, but that she went about life with the lush cadence of a waltz playing in her head! She worked, you might say, in waltz time. Swinging the vacuum cleaner back-and-forth, forth-and-back as if the skirts of her gown were brushing the floor of a Berlin ballroom. I wish I had figured this out early enough to see if waltz time could be overlayed on the rhythm of her pulses of acceleration as she drove, but by the time this idea occurred to me Emmie had long since faded into a memory. Still, it pleases me to think that maybe her odd gun-it-and-coast style of motivating her car might have been a sort of repressed dancing.

It was only long after her death that I got curious about those lyrics: what were the words that came next after "Around the world in eighty days," anyway? I learned then to my astonishment that those weren't even the right words—the song title, from the 1956 musical, never occurs in the song itself. Rather, it begins, "Around the world I've searched for you...." And the words that come next, the ones Emmie always sang with placeholder ta-tah-tahs, are,

I traveled on, when hope was gone,
To keep a rendezvous....

Mike

*You know how they talk about off-Broadway, and off-off-Broadway? Well, this post is off-off-topic. We'll have no more of this!

**I told everybody I earned $72k a year, but it was $72k gross, $39k net. Maybe...1991, so $143k/$77k in today's money.

Book o' the Week

American Geography by Matt Black, a great name for a photographer but a terrible internet name, impossible to search. Stan Banos calls American Geography a "handsome, well thought out and put together book." Matt's work is outstanding.

The link is a portal to Amazon. Thank you kindly for helping support The Online Photographer!

The following logo is also a link if you click on it:

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

GKFroelich: "For what it's worth, this was my favorite post since your one on Fotomats. Perhaps that's because I could relate to it so well, but it was a great read, and had me smiling the entire time."

Marty Knapp: "Mike, Thanks for making my day! Your essay this morning put big smiles on both my wife's and my faces. I could just see Emmie waltzing around...your description brought me right beside both of you. You have a gift of inviting us into the rooms and times of your life. I wish I was able to write as well as you, but for the time being I will be happy just reading your OT and OOT narratives! Please keep these coming!"

Jonathan: "If you are not familiar with Hans Rosling and the Magic Washing Machine you really should look it up. In addition to not having to worry, a functioning car/washing machine/whatever provides an enormous amount of free time. Having to take the car to the shop or waiting for a repairman can waste a whole day."

Scott Marriott: "When you said: 'This is getting longer than it is interesting,' I just about shouted: 'No it's not!' I enjoyed it immensely. I'm only a couple of years older than you and found many of your descriptions painfully funny, familiar and telling. I could easily hear more like them."

Robert Roaldi: "My wife and I have a running joke about money. We say that we want to die with zero dollars in the bank. She was speaking to her cousin a few months ago, after he had just retired, and she told him our line. He said, 'I want my cheque to the funeral home to bounce.'"

Mike replies: Funny, but I feel the opposite. I have never been much motivated by money; I didn't realize until a particular day in my brother's kitchen in 2003 that I had never actually tried to make money. Now I do feel the danger of insecurity in my old age, so I care more now. But mostly, the main reason I would like to earn some money is so I could leave something to my son. That's not the only thing, but it's really what motivates my ambition (what I have of it) more than anything else.

Gerard Kingma: "Years ago I read Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor. This post very much reminds me of that. It's about nothing and about everything at the same time. Thank you."

Mike replies: Years ago I had the opportunity to meet Garrison Keillor. He gave a talk at a bookstore in Georgetown. After the talk, a long line of people formed to meet him and exchange a few personal words. Most of the people in front of me asked deep questions, and each exchange seemed to take a lot of time. The line moved slowly. I was at the very end of the line, and I meant to ask him a deep question too: "How can I become a writer?" But as the line dwindled, the bookstore cleared of people, and the afternoon light outside began to shift toward dusk. When it came my turn, I opened with, "how are you?" and Mr. Keillor immediately answered, "tired." I looked at him more closely, and he did look very weary, and distracted, and I realized that what he most likely wanted more than anything was to get to his dinner—his eyes kept wandering toward the front door, even. So I just thanked him briefly for his talk and wished him a good evening. His face actually brightened when he realized he didn't have to talk to me! I didn't take it personally at all. Rather, I considered how kind it was of him to talk to everyone in the line, all the way to the very end, leaving no one out, even though he most probably very much wanted to be finished and leave.

Ernest Zarate (partial comment): "There are entire books, numerous self-help courses, workshops, counselors, computer apps, free 'advice' from family and strangers and much more that focus on money. But I’ve never seen or heard of anyone distilling wealth in all its many phases (i.e., to have or have not) down to washing machines. Never. Real estate. Exotic cars. Travel. Antiques. Stock market. IRAs. Retirement. Yes, all that and more. But never washing machines. To say nothing of household help, young and old."

Andrzej Rojek: "Mike, I liked your off-off-topic quite a lot indeed. I fully subscribe to your opinion that having lived without fruits of prosperity can sweeten them when they eventually appear.

"Poland where I was born and where I live now was on the wrong side of the iron curtain a few of decades ago. Permanent shortages of food and household items were facts of life in the 1980s. Russian cameras such as Smena (lower end) and Zenit (somewhat higher end) were all I could have dreamt of. East German Praktika seemed to be beyond my reach while Japanese SLRs remained a sort of unobtainium back then. When my friend got a colorful flyer of Olympus photo gear (I cannot recall the exact camera model and what I remember is Zuiko 50mm ƒ/1.2) we felt like kids looking at a candy behind a window pane. I feel it affects the way I appreciate and enjoy my cameras these days (including those that heavily fall short of what can be considered as fancy cameras). P.S., my Zenit is still in perfect condition after some 35 years (however, I haven't used it for quite a long time now)."

Peter in Boulder: "Off off topic or not, Mike, I greatly enjoyed it. Your definition of wealth resonated with me."

Geoff Wittig: "Ah, memories of laundry thrills past.... Washing and cleaning clothes is one of those boring fundamentals that explain why being poor is so soul-crushing and expensive. My first two years in medical school were spent in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn, during the nadir of New York City's 1980s crime and bankruptcy crisis. The closest laundromat was a grimy snake-pit crawling with cockroaches a half mile walk northeast from our apartment. If you didn't stay guarding your machine, your clothes would disappear. A heavy pocketful of quarters got you one load. There was at least one stabbing at that laundromat while we were there, so I did all the laundry; it was too hazardous for my petite wife. Affluent people generally have no idea how hard it is for working poor folks to get the laundry done; how expensive it is in terms of time, effort, and share of a very meager budget."

Mike replies: True dat. Barbara Ehrenreich's bestseller Nickel and Dimed has some vivid stories of that.

Comments

[Doug Anderson]

For most of my life I have believed that the ideal financial condition was independent poverty. Little income, few possessions, and no worries about money.

[c.d.embrey]

To me, being rich means you don't have to live in your car—like a lot of Americans do in SoCal.

At a young age I helped my grandmother use a mangle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangle_(machine) to wring out clothes. Our dryer was a line strung between two poles in the backyard. BTW this was during the 1940s in Los Angeles, CA. BTW2 my family got it's first car in the late 1940s, when I was seven years old.

Today's cooking lesson. Buy a bag of 16 bean soup mix. Boil a pot of water and dump in beans. A nutritious meal made from just boiling water—simple as that.

[John Merlin Williams]

When in conversation about the merits of money - having too little, just enough, or plenty of it - someone I worked for observed, "Money/riches/wealth gives you options." He also advised (especially appropriate in these times), "Never waste a good crisis."

[Rube]

Great post. Love it!

[Richard John Tugwell]

This is an off-post-off-topic comment. I can't tell because I didn't get further than the second mention of washing machine.

In the UK, when I grew up in the 50's-70's acquiring a washing machine was one of the ultimate status symbols. Despite the fact that communal laundry facilities were a rich repository of social interaction.

Then in the 1990's I moved to Europe (Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, and 15 years in Switzerland). It was then that I became a devotee of the communal laundry room that is often part of an apartment block. It frees up space in your apartment if that is limited, no noise while the laundry is going on, industrial quality washing and drying machines whose maintenance was the landlord's responsibility etc etc.

Some people who recognize this might have different opinions. In Switzerland for example there might often be a rota system where you could only use the laundry room on your designated 'laundry day'. Trick is when you decide on somewhere to live, first thing is to check the ins-and-outs of the laundry room.

I suppose in the land of abundance every house probably has it's own utility room, but not all of us are so lucky

[Jnny]

Did you ever buy that Speed Queen?

[Hugh Lovell]

Due to side effects from receiving cancer treatments, I've switched to using a laundry service called Family Laundry. I load up to 20lbs a bag. They come collect it, and return in a day or the next. The results are lovely clean clothes, folded, grouped together and tied with twine. It's not cheap, but it works very well and saves me from lugging a laundry bag up and down four flights of stairs.

[Robert Newcomb]

Good post! Very poetic and visual in my minds eye.
Write more not fewer.

[Henry]

Emmie's start-stop driving is a perfect metaphor for most people's financial lives. Driving smoothly (despite life's inevitable ups and downs) requires an extra bit of knowledge of how best to manage the 'gas pedal', while avoiding the common pitfalls.

I've had an eventful life, that should have left me homeless, but (almost unbelievably) instead left me a retired multimillionaire (and it's great that my offspring – that also followed this advice – didn't have to go into debt for education or to purchase a home), so I'd like to try to help others to replicate my investing experience, as a complete amateur, which almost everyone can do for themselves (it's likely the best gift you can possibly give yourself).

I got sick in my 30's, made about the same income as you, much less in early years, and was forced to quit work entirely in my early 40's due to disability, and shortly thereafter a natural disaster destroyed my home.

The trick is starting in your early 20's to invest at least 1-2 hours per day's worth of your salary and keep doing this (while also not neglecting needed insurance). Starting early in your career to invest every month, especially in your 20's is critical because it takes decades of financial compounding before the small amount you invested, overcomes the ups and downs along the way, and really gets to grow fabulously huge.

I got very scared about what would happen to me financially when I got sick so young, so spent a year while sick reading books about the basics (there were no websites then), and upped my savings to 50% of my income for the additional few years I was again able to work, before being forced to stop working completely.

But I didn't do anything financially that most people can't copy. Nowadays, its even much easier with widely available index mutual funds. The wonderful free Bogleheads website now tells you all about how to get started, explains it all, and has endless discussions, but the key is to get started investing that 1-2 hours worth of your daily income relentlessly into a very few low cost index mutual funds, do it automatically by computer every month, and stay the course over your entire lifetime. If you use a pay raise to fund that savings, instead of starting to spend more, it's even painless. Worked for me – kind of amazing! Hope that this helps.

[Kent Wiley]

A story well told. No need to apologize for the quantity of words needed to tell it. We come to read and think. Occasionally a striking (photographic) image gets included here @ TOP. The words do the job quite nicely, thank you.

[Henning]

A very evocative and relatable post. Leaving aside the various laundry methods, of which I've experienced many, the story of Emmie's driving hits home with me.

When I met my wife to be in 1968, she had been given a Ford Falcon by her father. It was the very, very most basic Falcon except for an automatic transmission (it was even the most basic brown/tan/dirt colour). She drove it like Emmie drove her car, with the accelerator being used as an on-off switch, which bothered me as Emmie's driving did you but was also doable as the car lacked power. I had a VW Beetle and she drove it the same way. One day as we were on a long drive through the interior of British Columbia and she was behind the wheel to relieve me, she suddenly woke me up to tell me that there was a policeman by the side of road ahead. I said 'Slow down!' as the accelerator was still in the 'on' position and had been for a while. The policeman congratulated her on clocking fastest time of the day. In a VW Beetle. We had it in writing that the car was capable of 92mph.

She has adjusted, though as she currently has an Audi TTS and in accelerator 'on' position she wouldn't stay on the road long enough to encounter a policeman.

[Chris Kern]

Mike: You can probably already tell this is going to be the weirdest post I ever wrote . . .

Close, but there may be other viable contenders. Maybe grist for a different kind of “Baker’s Dozen” post?

[Grant]

"Around—the world—in eigh-ty days...." "ta-tah-tah-ta, ta-tah-tah-ta...."

Occasionally I sing exactly the same words. I never knew that I was wrong and I even saw the movie in Todd-AO!

The depth of this blog never ceases to amaze me.

[Ernest Zarate]

Wealth, riches… money. A loaded topic for sure. Alongside sex, one of the big, existential issues in relationships. How to get it; how to use it; how to deal with not having enough of it… There are entire books, numerous self-help courses, workshops, counselors, computer apps, free “advice” from family and strangers and much more that focus on money.

But I’ve never seen or heard of anyone distilling wealth in all its many phases (i.e., to have or have not) down to washing machines. Never. Real estate. Exotic cars. Travel. Antiques. Stock market. IRAs. Retirement. Yes, all that and more. But never washing machines. To say nothing of household help, young and old.

Reading the various types of laundry adventures you shared brought to mind my own. One of the advantages of getting older (66) is you get stories of one’s own to tell. For instance, I recall being a boy and charged by my single mother (5 kids) to haul, by Radio Flyer wagon (we had no car), the family laundry to the laundromat a couple miles away. I’d stuff the clothes into as few machines as possible so I could use the “savings” at the liquor store next door to buy some candy and a soda. At the time, I thought it a fair exchange for my doing the chore.

You may have stumbled onto the next big financial thing, Michael!

Or not…

But I certainly enjoyed the post. Worth every penny.

[Thomas Mc Cann]

Wonderful post

[Bob Johnston]

I really enjoyed reading that Mike. My mother used to say "money doesn't bring you happiness but at least you can be miserable in comfort".

[Bob G.]

This reminded me of some old analog cameras I started with and came back to value their simplicity years later. I guess it’s the value of any tool that works well for the experience. I miss that consciously or not if the photographic process gets too complicated. When you have the time and control of it, complication can be a benefit.

[Romano Giannetti]

Hi, are you sure she wasn't singing the opening song of https://youtu.be/TxFY4PCk3Ew? It was quite a big thing for children in Europe... And their older brother ;-)

[Emmie was American, born in the US, and the time frame would have been more like 1968 at the latest, so I doubt that was it--but who really knows where she got the song? I presume she was just singing the title of the show tune with its melody, but of course I don't really know. --Mike]

[Terry Letton]

Wait a minute, doesn’t off off topic= on topic

[David Lee]

That was beautiful Mike.

[Dillan]

This is so much better than a gear review site!

[Severian]

An excellent, remarkable piece of writing. One of the true joys of TOP is that I never quite know what will be on the menu. Today, it was something truly delicious. Wealth through the lens of laundry is an excellent theme.

I hope you are submitting work like this somewhere else where they pay you to publish it. You would know much better than I where/what that might be.

[Bill Tyler]

Ah - washing machines. In my early married life, we bought used washers and dryers. When they broke, I could fix them with a couple of screwdrivers, a wrench or two, and a bit of common-sense. When the tub in the washer didn't want to turn any more, it was easy to replace the bearing holding up the back end (a few bolts and a readily obtainable replacement part) or to replace the drive belt that connected tub to motor. Our current machines are essentially user-unrepairable, just like current cars. The used machines cost maybe a couple of hundred dollars apiece. That's about the minimum service charge for the current ones. Ain't progress wonderful?

[Tom Burke]

Having read a number of comments, I suddenly had a light-bulb moment: that the need for a washing machine is itself a sign of comparative affluence.

I’m in my early 70s, and I can remember my school days in the 1950s and early 60s in the UK. I’m pretty sure I only had at most two shirts to wear to school, plus another to wear to church on Sunday. My father, too, just had a couple of shirts; he used to hang them over the back of a chair “to air”. Trousers simply never got washed; in my case I just grew out of them first. I don’t know what my father did - he was an office worker so presumably had to get his (only) suit cleaned occasionally, but that wouldn’t have happened often. Underclothes got washed out by hand, and hung to dry wherever was handy. I remember clothes rails suspended from the ceiling in the kitchens of houses - in winter, the kitchen was likely to be the warmest room.

I don’t think my family was unusual in 50s England: Dad had a regular job working for the railway, Mum worked sometimes when she was healthy enough, and there was my sister and I. Pretty much like millions of other British families at the time.

As we got into the 60s and 70s, it all changed - I had more clothes, enough to change out of school uniform (or out of work clothes, later) when I got home. (These included a pair of Levis, which could be washed, of course. And later tie-died T shirts and coloured loon pants; but we won’t go into that phase here….) And that’s when we got a washing machine. Up until then it hadn’t been necessary, for the limited amount of washing we did. As we got more money we bought more clothes, which in turn required further expenditure - on either a washing machine; or the laundrette (Britspeak for Laundromat); or even dry cleaning! It’s a slippery slope….

[Nick]

I loved this essay, and the perspective it relates is one I have long cultivated and usually phrased as, "Money can't by happiness, but it can often by some freedom from unhappiness."

On the laundry front specifically, I have dealt with the good (my mom doing everything) to the moderately bad (an apartment building with totally inept management and frequently-broken laundry machines). My current situation isn't too bad (fairly expensive coin op machines one flight of stairs down), or, at least, it wasn't until the pandemic quarters shortage! My bank wouldn't give me more than 1 roll at a time, and they rarely had any on hand; the grocery store would give me 4 quarters (!) maximum at a time. I literally resorted to feeding dollar bills into vending machines at work and hitting the money return button over and over at one point. Finally, I decided to wield my (limited) affluence to subdue the problem: I bought $500 worth of quarters on eBay. With shipping, it cost me over $600. Whatever. I haven't had to think about laundry quarters in the better part of a year. Even when (if?) the quarter shortage abates someday, I may just buy another massive brick of them so as to get another year of not thinking about the damn things again.

[John Krumm]

Possessions are funny things. My mom was frustratingly unattached to things. She made ok middle class money but lived like she was poor. The gambling didn't help. The one nice thing she had I talked her into buying, a new 1986 Nissan pickup.

She rubbed off on me though, I think. Not the gambling, fortunately, but I always enjoy giving away stuff, or selling it cheap. When my best friend drove my car off the road and totaled it in high school (uninsured and unlicensed) I felt almost renewed as I started to imagine my next stage in life. I ended up getting into mountain biking instead of car ownership, at least for a while.

My wife and I both come from similar class backgrounds, but she was a little more poor growing up. This leads to a sense of financial panic. She's a physician now, but that feeling can come back. For us, the first time we felt at ease shopping was realizing we could buy whatever we wanted in the grocery store, no problem. And retirement is still a concern, even for a physician. 401k's suck compared to the older pensions, and for class jumpers like my wife there is zero generational wealth to fall back on. We look at all these middle class Minnesotans with cabins around here like they are millionaires, but they likely just got them from grandparents.

[William A Lewis]

Caught this one late Mike but it's a great bit of writing.

And one thought - I don't make much in the hotel biz but one underrated benefit is that I can do my personal laundry in the hotel washing machines. Saves an incredible amount of time and money.

[Steven Belanger]

Lovely post, Mike. Thank you!

[Earl Dunbar]

I have been thinking about the cost of being poor. Not because I am, though I have been in the past and know what it’s like, how painful and mentally and emotionally debilitating it can be. Rather I think of it because I have a very dear friend in Europe who is a single mom, working freelance jobs (one of which is currently precarious) which don’t actually cover her monthly needs; she lives in one of the most expensive cities in the world. (It would be easy to say “jut move somewhere less expensive” but even a move is expensive and there would be job complications as well as others. Free advice is often very cheap.)

I do what I can to assist her, but still I worry about her and her precious child.

[Sean]

"The main reason I would like to earn some money is so I could leave something to my son"

Admirable, Mike. What do you hope you son will say about you after you're gone? If someone was to ask him "whet did your dad leave you? He'd probably say, if he's as you've described him all these years, "Alls I care about is that he never left me"

Sean

[Elsa Louise]

What a delightful slice-of-life post. So many cultural points of reference that have touched your readers, particularly those of a certain age.

And the song referenced was composed in three-quarter time, so, indeed, it is a waltz.

[Fred Haynes]

Enjoyable post,- and comments. It made me think of the book, that I hope your writing. I’m really anxious to see you finish it, especially when I know the writing will be as good as this last post.
Fred

[Graeme Scott]

Washing machines.

My Mother died a few months ago. Seven weeks before her death she’d been driving around as normal & going on five mile walks with my aunty. She spent the last few weeks of her life receiving excellent care & pain management in an NHS Macmillan Cancer ward.

She was receiving morphine to deal with her pain & was hallucinating at times but was calm & lucid. She recognised the hallucinations for what they were & didn’t find them frightening.

At one point she said ‘I love my washing machine’ & proceeded to talk about it.

When she was first married she had to do all her washing by hand. This could include boiling clothes in pans & wringing dry using a mangle. Hard work to keep a family’s clothes clean this way. I think she bought a washing machine as soon as she possibly could & always appreciated having one.

She told me about how much my Grandmother hated washdays. For much of her life it was a day long job heating water, hand washing using a poss tub ( poss tub ), wringing them out with a mangle & then attempting to dry them. I think she also acquired a washing machine as soon as she could. In the mid 60’s I remember a large white thing with an electric mangle above the tub & a separate free standing spin dryer in her kitchen.

My Great Grandmother didn’t trust the new fangled washing machines. She didn’t believe they cleaned clothes properly. She was also outraged when some of her neighbours started doing their laundry on a Sunday.

I’ve gone through a couple of periods without easy access to a washing machine. Doing laundry by hand eats up a lot of time & energy which could be used for more interesting, fun or life advancing activities.

Wealth

I suppose I’m a fairly feckless bastard who, if the world was a fair place, should have ended up homeless.

My partner & I are looked on with a mixture of bemusement & irritation by a least some of our family & friends who have more stuff than us. We live in a small house, don’t go on expensive holidays & don’t pay ourselves much from our small business. However, many of our interests & pursuits are part of our business activity and are therefore paid for by our business ( for example; art books, life drawing sessions, decent camera equipment & well specced computers ).

Our house is paid for & costs very little to run ( solar water heating & lots of insulation ) so with don’t have to worry too much if work is slow.

A few days ago I received an email from a friend who recently got in touch after nearly thirty years. She attached a photo of me taken when I was 27 or 28. At that time I owned the clothes on my back & not much else. I was living in a single room in a shared house. ( The inmates of that place were a rum bunch ). I had some health problems at the time but it was an interesting period & I knew a lot of fun people.

That night my partner Deb & I were sitting in our living room front of our wood burner drinks in hand. Referring to the old photo I said, ‘Y’know, if someone had told me when I was 28 that this would be my life at 58 I’d have said ‘Yeah that’s OK ‘.

[A fine story, thanks for sharing it. Good health and long life to you both. --Mike]

[David Dyer-Bennet]

For me, I preferred going to the laundromat, because I could use 3 or 4 washers at once, then 2 big dryers, and get it all done MUCH faster than at home. I didn't spend much time at home sitting around, when I could have used a single home unit in the same time I was doing other things.

[David Elden]

This is writing I'll remember, thanks.
Dave.

[Ralf]

I came here around 2012 for everything related to photography, but by now I'm pretty sure I really stayed and became a patreon for the way you write about your own life. Amazingly, you manage to make me feel like I can relate even though my life has never been anything like yours.
Thanks for the stories, way to go!

[Gerard Geradts]

"*You know how they talk about off-Broadway, and off-off-Broadway? Well, this post is off-off-topic. We'll have no more of this!"

I keep coming back here, only for these off-off subjects. So, please more of that!