A moving act of kindness
You really know who your friends are when you move house, especially if you failed housewife 101 back in the 70s when damp dusting skills were vital for maintaining clean surfaces and running a husband to ground.
This move, it’s mainly been relatives and blokes hiring trailers to lug furniture, and penetrating inner sanctums such as the spinster boudoir to oversee the biffing out of elderly garments. Ankle-deep in Quentin Crisp dust, they have sneezed their way through the thinning out of shabby belongings and helped box up the lucky items, which have survived the cull to live another day.
When the gentleman from the moving company furnished me with a quote, I kept apologising for the rather let-go state of the interior. He kindly assured me that the de´ shabille´ state of the joint was what is commonly referred to in the trade as ‘‘post-sale slouch’’.
To my delight, he also commented that its condition was typical of that of ‘‘an intellectual’’, music to the ears of this university dropout.
Exhausted from cleaning up and emotional au revoir-ing, I have been staying with friends of mine and Dorothy’s whose spotless abode is an endless rebuke to my slatternly ways.
The wooden floors have a dazzling French polisher’s gleam to them, and the cutlery drawer houses irons so sparkling you can clearly see one’s haggard reflection in them. I’m not saying they’re obsessive, but when you place an askew fork or a knife on the table they cannot restrain themselves from straightening it up.
Fortunately for moi, who hates minimalism, they are clutter-ists and I marvel at the damp dusting that has gone into their objets d’art. Compared to my haphazard interior decorative efforts, their equidistant placement of trinkets is mathematical.
Even the extensive and lovely garden bears no hint of a weed or trace of convolvulus. It’s official: even though I refer to them as ‘‘Two Dads’’, I realise I’m staying with my mother/s.
How I shudder to look back and remember how I continually broke my domestic goddess mother’s heart by leaving wet towels on the bed and just-stepped-out-of discarded clothes on the floor. I wince remembering her despair on discovering a piled-up collection of dirty bowls I’d eaten icecream out of and pushed under the bed. Shoes were always scuffed and went hungry for nugget, and an ironing board was something you just heaped more piles of clothes upon.
Morphing into a dirty hippy, the pong of my op-shop clobber, which reeked of mouldy dwellings, sent her completely orbital. She warned me that when my skin was old and wrinkled, I would deeply regret besmirching my youthful body with crumpled hand-me-downs. And she was right.
Why is it that the immaculately clad gays always knew this? So I am determined to learn the error of my ways and will endeavour (and I don’t mean Inspector Morse) to clean up my act and maintain a certain standard from which I shall not slip.
I tell this to the Two Dads and they roll their eyes in silent movie actor yeah rightness, but at least my mind is clean. The things they show me on their phones would make a sailor blush and have scarred me for life. And believe me I’ve done my time in the fag hag trenches.
Of course none of that matters. What does is kindness, lending a hand, and action speaking louder than words (or risque´ images). When all the dirt and dust is settled, that’s all there really is. ‘‘But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.’’ Micah 5:2