And now I'm in Dublin with a broken heart

It’s 2011 and I just had a vacuum repairman in my living room on a Sunday morning. (Dan and I keep calling him the Hoover-Fixer-Sucker-Guy and singing the song from Once.)

He was here to assess my mom’s Rainbow. Just “My Rainbow” to her. It had been making an awful high-pitched noise and there was a terrible smell of burning last time I used it so I wanted to get it a tune-up. Since the shop is an hour away and he lives here in town, Brian, a third-generation vacuum repairman whose father owns the place, offered to come out and have a look. A new hose and some basic clean-up and the machine should be good as new.

Anyone who knew my mom well understood that this vacuum was her most valued possession. She never cared for cars or furs but---with five long-haired daughters and various cats, dogs, and litters of puppies along the years---a good vacuum was important to her. She would extoll the virtues of her Rainbow to anyone who was in the market for a new vacuum. So effusive was she, that the Rainbow representatives who came out to our house to repair or upgrade her models over the years asked her to work for the company.

The Rainbow, an R2-D2-looking thing, locked into a water basin which sat on a wheeled ring on which you dragged the whole apparatus. There was a long, elephant’s trunk of a hose and various wands and attachments for dusting and upholstery and crevices but the water basin was what gave my mom her sense of vacuum superiority. There was no risk of all the dirt and hair and dust and bugs she sucked up erupting out of an over-filled bag. The spiders were dead. The dust was drenched. It all whirled in a cyclone around the basin so at the end you were rewarded with a gruel of dark water and sludge.

As a kid I was mostly just annoyed with the noise of it. If I was watching TV, the sound of the vacuum's wheels hitting the linoleum as my mom turned the corner from the dining room to the kitchen sparked irritation in me, aware of the impending interruption that would occur when she reached the family room. It was loud and it was cumbersome and I got annoyed whenever I was asked to schlep it from one part of the house to another.

Schlep it, not run it. She preferred to do the vacuuming herself than have us break her machine. You could borrow her sweater and stain it, you could shatter her favorite pitcher and my mom would have laughed. But I was scared of breaking her Rainbow. I once asked her if I could bring it up to NH to give my apartment a solid cleaning (the kind an electric broom just couldn’t handle), and though she let me, I saw a hesitation on her face that I had never before seen when I had asked to borrow anything. Of course before I could take it anywhere, I was first subjected to her Rainbow orientation speech which stressed, above all, the importance of not leaving the water basin attached after you’ve finished as condensation in the engine would prove fatal.

Thinking of her ambivalence now, I love it. I almost wish she would have told me no.

It wasn’t until last year when I was vacuuming her house every week that I finally understood the machine’s greatness, its efficiency and power. When I told her the floor attachment kept coming off she was stern----“That’s because you’re not putting it on right”---before showing me how to do it. It was a simple fix, you just had to know the machine. I took pride in the fact that I knew how to do it right. That she knew I knew. She was as grateful that I was cleaning her home as she was that I was respecting her machine.

She laughed when she saw me detach the water basin even just to take a bathroom break.

When she started losing her hair, I vacuumed twice a week if I could. The hair would amass in broad, thick webs on the couch cushions and floor and I tried to keep up with it all, protective of her pride. Once, after the hospice nurse had just been to the house, I eyed a small hair nest on the rug and grabbed it up with my hand, trying to be nonchalant about it so she wouldn’t see.

“Was that hair?” she said, missing nothing, and then she asked if I thought the nurse had seen it.

The day she died, after making arrangements at the funeral home, we came home to the family and friends who were still at the house and my mom’s hospital bed was gone, the furniture back in place, the floor vacuumed. The gesture was meant in kindness but I was disarmed by how gone it all made her. I missed even the threads of her scattered on the floor. Whenever I visited the house in the months following her death, I wished that I had vacuumed less and I would scour the rugs and floor, even around the toilet, hoping to find a little web of her hair.

Before she died, she told me she wanted me to have the vacuum, knowing I was the only one of her daughters who didn’t have a good one. But she had said this to only me and when my sister was moving into the house to help my dad out, it didn’t seem right to say anything or take it when there was still all that house to clean. My sister gave me her Kirby to use knowing I didn't have a solid vacuum.

“Mine is far superior,” was what my mom had to say of the Kirby when she was alive and she was right. I hated it. Fortunately for me, my sister and dad didn’t like the Rainbow and we traded back. I was ecstatic that I was actually getting it, but back in my apartment I found that its hose was ripped and had been duct-taped and it wasn’t working well. Then Dan accidentally broke the caddy for the extra attachments. Initially I felt intense irritation that it had been so mishandled and then I felt grateful for the chance to restore it.

The entire time Brian was here this morning, I fought a strange mix of tearfulness; I felt the pride a son might in fixing up his dad’s old Cadillac. The whole thing---a Rainbow man in my living room, my offering him coffee the way my mom would have---made me feel so much like her. She would be so glad that I’m putting the money into her Rainbow. “It’s a good machine!” she would say.

I told Brian I would be a Rainbow customer for life---one of those moments when I hear myself sounding exactly like her---but I wasn’t ready to spend $2,000 for a new machine.

I want to keep this one alive as long as I can, I told him.

I’m not even sure how old it is, though I think it’s the second one she owned. It could be over 20 years old. Brian said some people keep them running for 40. I’m sure somewhere my mom wrote down when she bought it. If it hasn’t been thrown out, there undoubtedly exists somewhere a manila folder held closed with an elastic band, which contains all documentation on her Rainbow complete with notes from the day she bought it jotted down in her warm scrawl. ”Brian---nice guy!” she would have written of today’s visit.

Walking in on me writing down my own notes after the appointment, Dan smiled. “Gig!” he said.

I kept writing.

9/25/11...Option to trade-in, refurbished models available...

But there was one piece of information provided that I didn’t need to write down: Brian’s warning about leaving the water basin attached when the machine isn’t running.

When he said it, I arched my eyebrows at Dan. He has been warned about this several times.