Had anyone tried to tell me when I was struggling through Kierkegaard in college that I would eventually talk to towels, I would have. . ..well, I would have. . .never mind, nobody could tell me anything in college. But there I was on a sunny unseasonably mild (who knows what "seasonable" is these days) Sunday February afternoon on tiptoe atop the commode, warning my towel tower that to topple now would be a BIG mistake and they had better think twice. (If a towel could think, what might it think about - late-night trysts with lint? Now there's a problem Soren never took up.)

I had attended the Chenilles concert with a bunch of loose women-er, loosely-connected-no, loosely-affiliated -crones-(are mature women who enjoy frozen dairy treats ice cream crones?) the Friday night previous and was still humming a little ditty , written by Peter and Lou Berryman, which features the refrain "Why am I painting the living room?" (There is a blue- grass band/ somewhere along the bay./ It is a summer's day/ WHY AM I PAINTING THE LIVING ROOM?) So my mood was already a little surly. But I actually had to paint my bathroom. And the towels actually stayed where they were after I spoke sternly to them, and if I wasn't painting the bathroom, I would have just been doing something else creative, like turning socks together or sorting ancient bottles of both pre-scription and over-the-counter nostrums from smaller into bigger heaps so that I could slide bigger heaps into my Treasure Trove of Half-Used Medicines drawer.

And while we're at it, WHY DO I ALWAYS TAKE AND NEVER USE HOTEL/MOTEL CREAM RINSE? Perhaps I should address the question directly to the two million bottles. But what's my choice? As long as there are girls with tangled, unmanageable hair anywhere in the world, it would be a sin to throw perfectly good cream rinse away, wouldn't it? And yet if I lined them up outside on my bottom step right next to the sidewalk on Gorham Street and marked them FREE! TAKE TWO! I don't think anybody would take them, really. Would you? (I guess I had better not try it with the medicines, huh?)I'll bet television is to blame for making me talk to inanimate things. Ads have featured women conversing with appliances for years. And who can forget the tiny -men- in- the- toilet ad? Wouldn't that put the fear of Lilith in a person? Look down and see three men floating a boat down there? No thank you. The last thing most people would do would be attempt to engage these succubae in chitchat. It would be like trying to talk to the Kirby. Trust me, Kirbys have less interesting ideas than hot rollers even. To the complete chagrin of Alex (you frequent readers remember Alex the Long- Suffering Son) I, of course, have a history of talking to traffic lights in the toughest possible terms-"JUST YOU TRY TO TURN YELLOW AND YOU'LL GET A PIECE OF MY MIND." Alex has now developed the ability to retract his head completely inside his coat collar-an atavism that will serve him well in his dating years I'm sure.

These particular women with whom I attended the Chenilles, a rag-tag group of 18-20 (the number varies because one of our very few rules is that anybody can leak out of any activity without fear of reprisal or even shaming) are seasoned moms and aunts and sisters who call ourselves either OWOW (for "Older Women on Wheels") or OBOB ("Older Babes on Bikes," which is my preference.) We take these long arduous bike trips, see. Well, okay, we took one longish bike trip last summer-but it was ARDUOUS enough to have been several trips, believe me. It involved inland tornadoes and Wildcat Mountain and bowling balls and Korbel-the less said about that trip the better. Suffice to say, everybody was babbling to trees before that long strange trip was over.

But for most of us softy types, it's still early-ish for bike riding, so we have begun to branch out and go to other activities together as well-enjoying each others' churlish company for some reason. (Wait a minute, I lost my train of thought somewhere half-way through that last rambling paragraph...oh yeah, women who talk to things other than people. ) Maybe the habit comes from being too much in the company of babies-whose only response to a philosophical question-"Now where did I put the DUZ. Am I going to find it in the refrigerator again?-is a goofy line of drool which starts at the lip and drizzles all the way to the floor. "Now, Pooper Pants, is to be to do, as Hegel holds, or is to do to be, as Heidegger posits?" But Heidegger sounds too much like "Hide and Seek" and "all that doo be doo" would cause anybody to chuckle, so most deep inquiries with babies descend into games of tag. This is getting me nowhere, just like philosophy, and the clothes are whispering "Wash me, wash me" and I'm going "shut up, will ya? I just washed you a month ago and look at you now."

-Norma Gay Prewett

(aka Gay Davidson-Zielske)


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