Dr. Screenlove, or: How I Learned to Start Worrying and Clean the House

For many of us, with age comes the realization that a great many of our parents’ insistences which seemed completely absurd to us as youth do, in fact, have some logical basis to them. I am no longer thoroughly perplexed by why I needed to always put the twist-tie back on the bread or why it was constantly unacceptable to my father that the driveway was a beautiful collage of bicycles, G.I. Joes and hockey sticks when he needed to put the car in the garage at the end of the work day. Notice I said many, not all; the fact my parents would chastise me with “What’s wrong with you, we didn’t raise you this way” and force me to walk home from the rink every time I got into a fight still seems ridiculous to me.

My sister and I used to joke that our house was not a home, it was a museum. Now, credit where it’s due, my mother has impeccable décor taste and an impressive collection of antiques, curios and well-appointed home accent pieces. When you’re ten it’s all just stuff. In the same way of thinking, both of us thought it was so non-sensical that we had to assist in fervently cleaning the house every time guests were expected that evening. Sweeping floors that had not even so much as a speck of dirt or dust and mopping others that gleamed with cleanliness, etc. etc.

This perspective never rang more true than some point in the evening when we ventured upstairs from our self-imposed (and welcome) banishment to the basement, only to find the foyer littered with shoes while coats and other garments of all types hung from every available door knob and banister post with likely many more strewn on the bed in the guest room. What had been the very picture of spic n’ span cleanliness and order now had become domestic chaos so very not the hallmark of the curator, a.k.a. mom.

If I would have had some measure of insight at such a tender age, I would have used the money they gave me to buy them (still get a kick out of that) Christmas gifts to pick up a coat rack from CoatRackSelect.com, where they provide aesthetically pleasing means of garment retention. Considering the large number of guests they would often entertain, perhaps a hall tree would have been more appropriate. A storage bench would have been thoughtful as a means of containing the sprawl of footwear. Come to think of it, my father could have uses a set of coat hooks or a wall coat rack for the garage as well as my mother would frequently nag him about the mechanic’s pull-ons that were often strewn on the top of freezer out there.

Relatedly, if I would have had the foresight to buy them a fireplace screen from FireScreenSelect.com, I would have unwittingly averted the time a particularly motivated ember shot far from the hearth and left a permanent singe in mom’s antique Turkish area rug. Considering her fear of such an incident occurring again, perhaps I could have been the one to recommend the set of fireplace doors they purchased shortly thereafter. There is a wide variety of fireplace accessories and fireplace tools that I could have given to show I cared about the museum just as much as she did. A fireplace grate might have suggested maturity beyond my years in “being prepared for the worst” if, heaven forbid, an entire log should roll out onto the aforementioned much-cherished rug.

Twenty – twenty hindsight I guess, but one can’t help but wonder how much more of a “thoughtful son” I could have been if I had strayed from the routine of socks, bath salts and neckties for even so much as a year.