Snore?

Mij and Marf "Wedding" Photo

I don't know where this memory came from, but it popped up recently. While living in New York with Fred, we would occasionally take in people who were trying to break into the city. We were a sort of launching pad, if a very small one. We lived in a studio apartment and Fred and I were very much in each other's pockets. So, taking in a third party was a stretch. We tried to confine it to people we knew and liked from back South.
This brings in someone I will, to protect his anonymity, call Mij. Our Dear Friend Mij Mubnergard came to stay with us. Now, Fred and I (and I can admit this now that my mother is dead) shared a sofabed. Mij had to sleep on the floor, when he arrived, on the sofabed cushions. We wanted to give him time to get on his feet, leave the nest, fly on his own - yadda-yaddah. As it happened, he would be getting a little extra time because I was scheduled to go to Cambridge to see Temple at Harvard Law School. I would be gone a week or more. Undoubtedly, I would be sharing Temple's bed as well (sorry, Mom). Before returning, though, I gave Fred a call to see how things were going.
"How's Mij?" I asked.
"Still here," he moaned.
"Oh," and a thought occurred to me. "Should I find another place to stay?"
"No, no," Fred insisted, "come home!"
When I arrived I found that Mij had made himself at home, moving to the sofabed. Fred had done his best to make things uncomfortable for him. He insisted that Mij stand out in the hallway to smoke. At night, though, we were all in the same bed, Mij then Fred, then me. It was ... cramped.
Most of the time we weren't all in the apartment together. Mij and I would be alone waiting for Fred to finish a show for the night. Don't get me wrong, we loved Mij. We enjoyed each other's company, it was just too small a space for three people.
One day Fred made a strangled noise from the kitchen area. He was standing at the clothes closet (in the kitchen) and holding a white shirt at arm's length.
"Look at this!" he squawked and I dutifully moved the six feet required to get from the couch to the kitchen.
It was one of Fred's shirts. The collar of the shirt was almost black with dirt. "He must have worn this for a week! And then hung it back up instead of putting it in the laundry pile!" Fred was very particular about his clothes and his appearance. Mij had not asked to borrow a shirt. He'd worn it until dirt was ground into it.
"He has to go," said Fred.
"Don't do it when I'm here!" I pleaded. I hate confrontations.
Later that week Fred called me at work. "What are you doing this evening?" I didn't have any plans and I said so. "That's fine if you want to go out with your friends," he said, pointedly.
I sucked in my breath. "This is it, isn't it? You're going to tell him to go."
"I thought Mij and I would go out for dinner," he said.
"He's there, isn't he?"
"That's fine. Some other time then." He was going to let Mij have it, firmly, and then he was going to go off to work, leaving me to deal with the shrapnel. I stayed away as long as I could.
When I got home, Mij was standing in the hallway, smoking. He asked me about my day. And I returned the favor, as if I didn't know what had gone on.
"Fred told me I had to go," he said, putting out his cigarette and following me inside. "But, you know, it's just as well. I just can't stand the snoring anymore."
"Snoring?" I began, worrying that I might have been disturbing his sleep.
"Fred's snoring. It's just too much. I can't take it."
"Snoring?" I reiterated, "but Fred d-" and I caught myself. I had never heard Fred snore, and he was usually asleep first. He was intentionally turning to face Mij each night and snoring very loudly. Such genius!
After that, Fred and I agreed on some rules for houseguests, who, like fish, take up way too much room after three days. We had three basic rules for the House:
1. We Share Everything (towels, tableware, food, bevvies, space).
2. Anyone who spends the night has to meet the approval of both residents because
3. See rule number 1.
A couple of years later, I was the one who got the Dinner. Fred was crashing and burning and didn't want me there when it happened. We went out for dinner and after we ordered he said that he had to tell me something. He told me I had to move out and once he'd told me, he felt better and tucked in when the food arrived. My salad turned to ashes in my mouth. Oh, well. What goes around, comes around.
I moved in with two other people and decided it was time to leave New York. One of my new roommates, let's call him Nad, was a backstabbing little trick who lied about the cost of the rent so he could charge us girls more and get a free ride. When I was packing to leave, he switched sweaters on me (we had bought identical sweaters) because he had torn the armpits out of his. Nad was the nightmare roommate I had not experienced until then. He did have his good points, though, I must admit. He had good taste in boyfriends and we enjoyed some Metropolitan Opera perks thanks to him. This just goes to show that it's not always who you know that counts, but with whom who-you-know is sleeping.

The Sedaris's Are Not Dysfunctional

I was in LibraryThing this morning reading posts on librarians who librarything and blog when I followed some links to a review of a book by one of my favorite authors. The reviewer referred to the Sedaris family as dysfunctional and that while the reviewer laughed at the stories, they also made the reviewer sad. I started to submit a comment, but it wasn't working and the site didn't accept it. Fortunately for you, hahaha!, I saved the comment and I add it here:

You know, I get a completely different reaction to Sedaris's family, but then I have read just about all his books (there might be one I missed). His family was deeply involved in each other and his parents apparently supported him in all his crazy incarnations (until it became obvious that he was gay and his father threw him out, but apparently his father has gotten past that). If anything, they were too much in each other's lives.
Despite all the cigarettes and alcohol (which look normal by 1960s standards) of the parents and the apparent drug use of the children, they are functioning pretty well. The Sedaris kids were "encouraged" to do volunteer work in the summers and to take music lessons (which they were allowed to discontinue when they showed a lack of interest or aptitude). Despite their upper middle class status, they did not consider "menial" jobs beneath them. They rally around each other when things go wrong.
My reaction is often one of delighted relief, mostly that his family, while entertaining, was not mine. Yet at the same time, I am envious of their spirit and lack of reserve. My family is northern euro and despite the eerie parallels (IBM, drinking-which goes with the IBM, moving south, an overly-thrift-conscious dad, live-in granny of foreign birth, my move to Manhattan to pursue acting of all things), they come off as, well, boring. This leads me to the tentative conclusion that Sedaris may be, how you say, exaggerating the seemingly dysfunctional bits just a wee bit. And I seem to note that they come off as being very, very ... happy.

That was all I had intended to put in there, as it was just a comment on the review, which shouldn't be longer than the review itself, right? And I left out the bit about how much I just plain love David Sedaris. I stood in line for over an hour (it might have been two, I'll have to ask my husband) for his autograph on his cd, "Live at Carnegie Hall," but that is nothing compared to the amount of time he sat there autographing. Yes, he's making money (ca-ching! ca-ching!), but he stayed until the absolutely last person got their autograph. He spoke with people as if he really liked them (perhaps he's just hunting for new material). He presented new material at his reading, rather than capitalizing on his old stuff. And then there are those eerie parallels.

I was an IBM child. Even after my dad left IBM, we were still tied up in the IBM satellite system of friends and vendors. My parents were drinkers. They had been smokers, but gave it up fairly early. All of my dad's friends were grateful because Dad was a terrible mooch. In the end I think they only gave it up because it was an expense. My mother did some occasional smoking and tells a story about how after one of her Kaffeklatsches we, and I was only three or four, shared out a Turkish cigarette whose colored paper matched the theme colors for the party. As a family we would eat the wine gelatin that was leftover from such frolics, right down to the family beagle. Tommy (named after the IBM president, the dog's full name was Thomas J. Watson Shopmyer Jr. the Second in a comic parody of the habit of naming a child after said prez in order to get the $50 bonus) would whimper and whimper until he got the gelatin, which he ate gingerly and spit out the grapes.
My parents and their friends used to get drunk and then pull out the IBM songbook for a good old, drunken sing-along. Now, my sister claimed that our parents' parties were just short of orgies. And she actually went so far to say to our mother when she was married and had children, "Mother, we have nice parties." [Mom's retort to that was that she had "fun parties."] Speaking as someone who sat in my sister's laundry room and translated the subtitles on the x-rated movies for one of her and her husband's legally blind friends, Blind Fred (he could not see well enough to follow the video and read the subtitles), I can't recall my parents' parties being quite as "nice" as that. Yeah, the adults jumped up and kissed each other at midnight on New Year's Eve, but I don't recall any couples under the table or in a spare bedroom. Of course, I was nine years younger than my sister.
I'm beginning to suspect that my sister could have written some Sedaris-type stories about our family that I just can't. I am loath to exaggerate. I scruple to misrepresent. It's one thing to write wild tales of fiction, but I can't do it about me or my family. Consequently, these Tales of the Blonde Shikseh wind up being almost funny. My experiences are not quite adventures. For this, I apologise, but at least you know that, barring my infamous poor memory, everything that I have written here is factual.
The cartoons, though, might have a teeny bit of exaggeration.

Doin' the Dishes

I have learned that older people don't see well. Or hear. This is doing the dishes without my sister, while I was living as an adult (in my 40s) with my parents between jobs.

Doin' the Dishes: The Beginning

These things always start somewhere. My mother recounted to me how her mother and her mother-in-law behaved when they were both visiting at the same time and offered to do the dishes. No, really. Would I lie to you?