YET MORE NOSTALGIA

Even in such places as Istanbul, I like to see laundry hanging on the clothesline. Even, as I said, in makeshift clotheslines on tenement balconies. On small porches in the inner city where you know almost no sunlight and certainly no fresh breezes do the blow drying jobs.


Why that scene appeals to me, I don't know. Something about the outside. Something about families working together. Something about clean clothes.

Well, at least non-dirty by-wear clothes. When it's a necessity to have fresh clothes to put on, because the closet is pretty bare. Again, why I wax poetically about this probably has more to do with a yearning for a time past.

Because we currently have a lousy dishwasher that sometimes leaks, sometimes doesn't open the soap dispenser, most times leaves spots on glassware, and doesn't do a great job of drying plastic popcorn bowls, for instance, I get to hand dry, well actually dishcloth dry the plastics. There's something nice about that. Of helping out in the kitchen. To return, at least in my imagination, to a time when we had no dishwasher and we all had to pitch in.

Like hand washing the car. I still do that a lot. I know, it's a lot easier to go through a car wash and it's not all that expensive. But I like to chamois down and clean the wheels and get that grease under my fingernails that takes a good scrubbing to get off. It even leaves black residue on my fingers themselves highlighting my, at the least, partial fingerprint. Again, it's an ode to a bygone time. A memory of what I used to do.

So while I'm being in-the-remember-when mode today, I'm getting hungry for a hamburger from a mom-and-pop diner. A family run drive-in before, yep, before the chains. But doggone, I don't know where to find one in Scottsdale. Not even a neighborhood store or pharmacy or sporting goods store or bookstore.

I bet when I take my walk today, I won't even see any laundry on the line. Where did 1957 go anyways?