Hippy Cats and Advice From the Elderly

I was trying to vacuum my Mother’s living room area. My children , just by their existence and whatever they are made up of, seem to shed bits of , well, stuff all over my Mother’s living room at a rate somewhat akin to a nervous cat with mange. I am not sure if it comes off their clothes or just them. I tell them take their shoes off at the door. They manage to shuck their shoes, coats and backpacks in a sort of haphazard line the fifteen feet between the front door and living room couch which is in front of the God of the Living Room; the television. I remind them, sometimes (very) loudly to put them on the chair.

Now, my Mother has never enjoyed housecleaning. She stacks things on tables, often times to the point of overflowing. She’s a WWII era kid.

“I save it because I never know when I may need it.” WHich is often followed by, “I’ll be damned if I can remember where I put it, but I am sure it will turn up!” then the lesson, “I remember when I had those burlap sacks in the attic for twenty years n when K cleaned out the attic she threw them away and I needed them for storing onions the very next week!”

Mom likes a clean kitchen but floors have never been her strong suit. I am the same way. I just kind of forget. It’s there, under my feet, but unless there is something sticky or crunchy I will probably ignore it.

Maybe my Mom does this too. Maybe it just that she is 79. Yet, if this is the case she has been 79 for about 38 years. Although I do remember her wringing out the rag mop and mopping the floor every couple of weeks or so when I was a kid.  The chair barriers would go up between living room and kitchen and there was hell to pay if you walked on that floor before it was dry, even in sock feet.

It’s the same for vacuuming. As she has gotten older and her back has gotten worse it just hasn’t been a huge priority. Her eyes are getting bad now as well, so she can’t see the grime as well. Her give-a-shitter is also breaking more and more, and I don’t blame her. My children and I are here every day and that is twenty-nine days too many in a month.

So, to keep a somewhat shaky hand on the rug and floor debris, either I vacuum her living room or force my children to do it.

I hate her vacuum. It is a CMS 1000, a brand they don’t even make anymore. It was one of the first bagless vacuums. It’s an upright, weighs approximately 14 tons and could suck the hair right off a dog. It’s little catch lock is also mostly broken so you go to put it into it’s upright position and it falls down dead. Hard.

Doing any sort of task in front of my Mother is a lot like wearing a huge sign that reads “NEVER DONE ANYTHING LIKE THIS BEFORE. POSSES NO COMMON SENSE. PLEASE DIRECT MY EVERY MOVEMENT.”

“Be sure you get that cord out of the way! The vacuum will eat holes in the cord and you’ll get electrocuted.”

“Yeah, Mom. I know about cords and vacuums.”

“I flip the end of the rug up and then you can vacuum the stuff that gets pushed underneath.”

I press my lips together. I remind myself I am a respectful person.

I break out the extensions to work on getting the dirt out of the large gaps between the floor boards. It was a house slapped together in the 50s up in the Canyon when they built the Hungry Horse Dam. It was moved down the valley after the dam workers no longer needed it. Years ago when we first pulled up the old nasty rug, there were strips of calking filling in the gaps. The caulking is gone now, but the floor dirt finds them.

Mom begins scooting herself around in her chair.

“Here, you want me to hold my feet up so you can vacuum under them?”

“No, thanks, I’m good, I’ll get back to that spot.”

It drives her nuts I know, that I do not do things in a methodical organized manner. I go back and forth, a patch here, a patch there, until something else catches my attention.

Like those monstrous dust varmints under the gas heater. They are bigger than bunnies, more like dust badgers. I have to use the hose without the floor sweep because the dust badgers choke the opening closed in their fight to remain free. Hairballs are not my thing. I can handle spiders crawling on me. Just do not make me touch any form of hair gobbets.

My Mom launches into a tale I remember from my childhood. This is odd because I was there, I remember it, and she is telling me my own history as if it is new. Only she is screwing up the details.

“When I had that old Filter Queen vacuum G had a white cat named Meth. He was deaf. He liked to lay under that vacuum when I used it. It must have felt like a huge purr.”

“Snowball was the deaf cat, Mom” I correct, “Meth was the one she got from the guy who fed him hits of acid. He’s the cat that had the flashback, freaked out and tried to run out of the house through the closed glass window. Glass everywhere.”

“I thought that was Coke.”

“Nope. Coke was the one that ate chocolate then threw it up all over my new sneakers.”

Take a guess at what my sisters’ hobbies were in high school. Between the years of 1974 and 1979 I don’t think there was an animal that lived in our house that wasn’t named after some controlled substance. Up until that moment, vacuuming my Mother’s rug I didn’t really think of the fact that all the cats were named after drugs. Those were just their names. Sad thing was, back then, my parents didn’t know they were named after drugs either. I am sure they thought Coke was named after the soda, being a cola-colored calico. Snowball was white, so I am sure that seemed innocent enough. Meth, well, they probably thought he was named after some hippy love musician. I remember the day G and her party friends painted the pot plant on the ceiling in her upstairs bedroom. It’s still there…a commemorative piece in memory of some really wild party.

The drug culture took my parent’s house by storm when I was little. I remember watching my eldest sister K freaking out and screaming her head off in the middle of the living room floor as Dad sat on her to keep her down and our local doctor and family friend injected her with some sedative to knock her out. I was three or four. She was sixteen or seventeen.

My sister G took me up the North Fork with a bunch of friends of hers and I got out of the car to sit by the front fender and cry because the pot smoke got too thick and I thought she would drop dead because Mom always said they were killing themselves. I was four, she was fourteen. She told me it was ok that there was nothing wrong with it and later that day she taught me to hitch-hike when we were walking through town.

“Stick your thumb out like this! No! Other hand! Yeah, like that. Now let’s turn around and walk backwards! Wait for a car. Here comes one! Put your thumb out! No! Other hand! Yeah! Alright, they’re stopping! Let’s go!”

I think it was some friend of hers, the guy in the truck that stopped. I didn’t know. I just thought it was cool to stick your thumb out and have a ride. I thought my sister was awesome. I wanted to be just like her when I grew up.

“Are you going to vacuum there under the piano?” Mom’s voice broke in. These are the times it is hardest to love her. My Mother believes I am a failure and a complete screw up and she can’t even trust that I will do the simplest tasks right. Or she is just a rabid control freak.

In my inner cartoon world of the visions of what if, I reach over with the vacuum extension and with a ‘floop!‘ suck her up out of her rocking chair, right inside the swirling dust tornado in the bagless canister.

“Shhh!” I tell her.

This is also why I have never, EVER tried hallucinogens.