There I was in my socks, and my feet couldn’t stand still on
the wood floor. From the other room, the
iPod was cranking with the Tams singing “Be
young, be foolish, but be happy.”
I wasn’t dancing.
I was ironing.
Huh?
Yep, I was.
At 9 o’clock on Thursday night, I was
ironing two pairs of all-cotton khakis.
And when the Embers started in on “I
love beach music,” I drifted back to my dorm room in the Oglethorpe House at
the University of Georgia. With each
spray of starch and swish of the steam iron, I was laughing about those knocks at
my dorm room.
To some of those citified fellows on
our hall, I’m sure they figured I was another bumpkin who fell off the turnip
truck as it passed through Athens. But
they soon learned I had some things they didn’t: an ironing board, a GE steam
iron, spray starch and the knowhow to use them.
So they started knocking on room 212’s door.
As I was growing up between sisters,
Sandy and Sheila, Mother made sure I learned all the necessary housekeeping skills,
too. When I got to Fort Campbell for
Army boot camp, no one had to show me how to clean a toilet. And at 187 S. Ninth St., I learned how to use
Comet and a toothbrush to scrub mildew out of the grout in the shower’s ceramic
tile.
There were no vacuum cleaners in our Kentucky
barracks, but I was a veteran of the clean-floor wars. After we vacuumed our family’s tile floors,
Mother would walk through barefoot. If
she felt one grain of sand, we didn’t just vacuum that one spot. No,
ma’am. We re-vacuumed it all—again.
She called it “re-licking the calf.” No, sir, when it came to spit-shining,
Drill Sgt. Raymond Wells didn’t have anything on Marjorie NeSmith.
Mother was the same way about
clothes. She wanted them clean and crisp.
I remember her ironing our sheets and even Big Dink’s boxer shorts. One of her specialties was to dip shirts in
starch water, roll them up and put them in the freezer before ironing. You won’t find much of that these days. And in 1966, you couldn’t find many, if any
other, steam irons in our dormitory.
As my parents were loading their
Buick to haul me to college, two of the last things Mother put in the trunk
were from George Barnes’ H&H Appliance: a steam iron and an ironing
board. One Friday night, a guy came with
a wadded-up oxford-cloth Gant shirt. He
was desperate. He wanted to look sharp
on his date. In his Bronx accent, he
begged, “Please, please could you iron this
for me?” Looking back, I could have probably paid my way through that
freshman year—ironing.
Fifty-one years later, I don’t do
much ironing. But if the need arises,
I’m ready to kick off my shoes. Just
turn up the tunes.
dnesmith@cninewspapers.com
