[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.
