Ammo Grrrll has second thoughts about FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS – A Happy New Year Break From Politics. She writes:
Like many of you, I am but one generation away from the lack of indoor plumbing. My experience with it was being dragged to visit my maternal Grandma Eva’s twin sister who still lived on a farm with an outhouse. I flat-out HATED going there. It was close to a hostage situation. Sadly, in the ’50’s there was yet no Amber Alert. Great Auntie Iva was a wonderful woman, but a terrible housekeeper, which was surely made more difficult by the presence of live chickens on the kitchen table and feathers everywhere. It cured me forever from being a fan of “free range” chickens. No matter the weather, we kids tried to be outside.
One time my cousins and I got into some little green crabapples off Great Auntie’s tree and the subsequent time spent in the wretched outhouse put me off all apples colored green for life. Sorry, Granny Smith, for verdant racism. An outhouse would be the perfect COVID test to see if you’ve lost your sense of smell. Not bothered? Straight to an ICU ventilator!
My father’s family in South Dakota was relatively “rich.” Grandma had been given a large two-story house as a wedding gift from her prosperous Dutch farmer father. I thought it was a castle when I was a kid. It had a yuge screened-in porch, orchards and gardens. Grandma taught me to make dancing dolls out of Hollyhocks and hats from rhubarb leaves.
The house had five bedrooms and one bathroom downstairs with a clawfoot bathtub. There were six kids in the family. They got drinking water for the kitchen from a cistern through a pump that had a nylon stocking over it to filter out things like – AGGHH! — WORMS! I drank only milk when I visited Grandpa and Grandma. That’s probably how Daddy got so immune to everything that he survived COVID at 95.
Mother’s family, on the other hand, was much poorer, sharecroppers who lost their farmhouse in the Depression from being unable to pay their rent for nine straight months. The rent was $8.00. They moved into a town of 237 souls, including John Hinderaker’s kin. Though they still had an outhouse, at least they had running water. On the farm, Grandpa had to haul water by horse and wagon in cream cans from several miles away. They bathed in a tin washtub on Saturday night, all three of the little girls using the same water.
One of the first Texas jokes I ever heard went like this: Relatives from “up North” were visiting a wealthy rancher in Texas and the wife of the couple went into the fancy bathroom and began to draw a full bath. The lady of the house knocked on the bathroom door and said, “Honey, that’s enough. In Texas, we don’t spend water like money.”
I loved that joke because Mama had the same attitude, except she didn’t spend money, either. As small kids, my sister and I would bathe together and we were allowed a couple inches of water. (Luckily, with displacement, it would turn into three inches. Especially after our baby brother was thrown in as a kind of interactive bath toy. Yay, Archimedes!) We would try to sneak more water in. The kitchen shared a wall with the bathroom and we would always get busted. Mother would bang on the wall, “I HEAR you, girls!”
The first FULL bathtub of my life was in the dorm the first day of college in 1964. The guilt ruined the ecstasy of it. Old habits die hard. But eventually we all take for granted the crazy level of luxury that is life in America for almost everyone who is trying at all.
Now I mention all this deep background because a week ago Thursday I started a bath in what famous novelist Max Cossack calls my “Susan-shaped” tub. Max is still alive and writing novels because I take that as a compliment. True, the tub is short, but it is very deep. Haha. Anyway, it is so deep that it takes about 15 minutes to fill up, during which I can make coffee, make the bed, and putter around. I stepped in and IMMEDIATELY leapt back out with a yelp because it was ICE COLD. What the heck? Or words to that effect.
Max did not hear me scream because he was writing in his office with the door closed and his “wife-cancelling” headphones on to boot. I could have been attacked by wolves and he would only discover it when he got hungry much later. “Oh my goodness, LOOK at this mess! NOW who is going to make my sandwich?”
Anyway, first I did what we all do in a similar situation. I tried the hot water in every sink – yup, ice cold — and concluded correctly that, unlike “racism,” it really was a “systemic” problem. And I figured out further that the water HEATER in the garage must be involved. Duh. I feared I would find the tank leaked all over the garage floor. But, thank God, it was all dry. Time to call my Water Heater Guy, one Harley Don, the Handyman.
He came within a couple of hours and immediately diagnosed the problem as the thingy on the front that controls temperature was burned out. That’s as much as I retained. Technical information goes in one ear and out the other without stopping even to approach the ever shrinking area of my brain which retains information. Harley Don made note of the Service phone number, plus the part and model numbers and told me that they usually have overnight delivery and he would come back to install the “thingy” when it arrived.
And now came the real fun. I sat on Hold for exactly one hour trying to reach the humorously named Reliant Company located convenient to Arizona in Tennessee. Then they cut me off and said they had captured my phone number – please Press One if that is correct – and would call me back as soon as an agent was free. By golly, they did! At 9:00 p.m. when it was too late to have the part arrive on Friday and, of course, there was no delivery on the weekend. We hoped to have hot water again by Tuesday assuming that on Monday the part arrived before 9:00 p.m. and Harley Don was not off on a motorcycle trip.
And so began an adventure in “Doin’ It Old School,” filling up the kitchen sink with boiled water to do dishes and putting about three inches of cold water into the tub and then adding two spaghetti pots-ful of boiling water for what turned out to be a brief, surprisingly tepid bath. Max opted to go to our complex’s Village Center to use the showers off the weight room.
Because of the miracle of capitalism – even under the duress of a pandemic – the part arrived in the early evening on Monday. Harley Don came early on Tuesday morning (sans mask – he had already had Commie Flu). It was installed in 10 minutes and by noon I was soaking in a deep, HOT tub.
In truth, the Reliant people in Tennessee were very helpful. Max had looked them up on the Internet (another miracle). And was quickly routed to their Parts People. So we were mildly inconvenienced for five days. And THIS is the system that the leftist lunatics in America want to destroy. Over my dead yet clean body.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.