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.

Lifetime Movies present - A Writer's Dilemma: The Lola Mellowsky Story

I take every opportunity to post this photo. The power of visualization.

So, there I was---“writing.” When I put it in quotation marks it means I have the document on which I am supposed to be working open on my desktop but am instead engaging in “research”. ( For example, today it was integral to my “writing” that I watch the Jim Carrey/Emma Stone video ). (The Spanish subtitles made it somehow better for me.)

Then I got to thinking of the really important stuff.

I got to planning which, as any successful human knows, is something regular people think successful people do a lot of. (This is what I’ve heard. Being neither successful nor particularly regular, I can’t speak with any certainty.) So I’m sitting there and I’m doing my planning thing---if I write for a few hours before tomorrow’s dentist appointment and then return e-mails afterwards from the coffee shop then I’ll have plenty of time in the evening to check and see if Emma Stone made a response video (she really should). It was then that I realized that I have left the most important detail of my writing career---perhaps the most important detail of my life; perhaps the most important detail of all the details in the land--- completely unexamined.

What picture am I going to use for the book jacket of my as yet unwritten book?

HOW COULD I HAVE OVERLOOKED THIS?

This is way more important than unquotationed-marked writing.

Shall I hold a cup of coffee? French-pressed or cappuccino? Should I be snuggling with a dog? Do I need to get the dog now so it will like me enough by the time I publish to sit through the photo shoot? A well-bred black lab or an orphaned three-legged mutt with cataracts? Will a downtrodden dog upstage me?

Should I smile warmly from a riverfront porch or try for depth and intelligence against a backdrop of bookshelves and a Manhattan skyline? Do I put my chin in my palm? Should I be on a swing set laughing joyously in long braids? Should I start growing my hair out now?

Do I need to start working on my Blue Steel? Should I sleep with the photographer so he goes heavy on the air-brushing? Should I use a picture of Emma Stone instead?

Should I wear a vest?

Do you think vests will be in by the time I publish?

Are vests in now?

Should the caption under the photo say “The writer at her home in NH” or “The writer on a water slide” or the “The writer making a ham sandwich”?

And what of the “About The Author”?

This is Lola Mellowsky's first published work though she always wished she had come up with the idea for the Encyclopedia Brown books. She looks forward to embarking on her own young adult series, Thesaurus Blue.

And the acknowledgements?

I wouldn’t be here were it not for the generous spirit of a kind-hearted many who let me blow them to get published. And this book certainly wouldn’t have come together without the CVS clerk who let me blow him for the Scotch Tape.

Of course a shout out to my 11th grade PE teacher is in order for flunking me and thereby cementing my understanding that I would never play professional badminton but I was hoping to save that for my Oscar speech.

Now that I've identified this oversight I'll be sure to give it far too much undivided attention.

But not now. Now I must go and "write."

Thesaurus Blue isn't going to write itself.

Besides, I'm pretty sure I've found the perfect photo.



The writer after Nog-Bombs on Christmas morning.

Home stretchin'.

I am now on my third leg of this Tour de Niece watching Molly Moo for the rest of the week and into a bit of next. I can handle the child with no degree of difficulty. I am going to murder the new family dog. She’s a puppy still at six months old and she is a giant pain in the ass---chasing the cat around, spazzily prancing from couch to chair, eating pillows when nobody’s looking. I am bottomlessly grateful that Dan is allergic to dogs and cats and this will never be my fate. (Also, I kind of love the little barking shit and am happy her sleep crate is in the room I’m staying in so we can engage in psychic snuggling. I would let her in the bed but it’s against house rules.)

Last night Dan and I helped Mol with a little homework project which had her cutting off the top half of a cereal box to be used in her classroom as storage for library books, folders and whatever other presumed crap a fourth grader acquires throughout the school day. After the adult-guided scissor portion of the exercise, Molly was to decorate the “book box” as she wanted. While the kiddo was out of earshot, Dan and I brainstormed potential decorating schemes. Swastikas and pictures of horse genitalia were our first ideas. Writing “White Power” in bubbles letters along its side was Dan’s next suggestion. We shall not soon be parents though I think I’ll take several birth control pills tonight just to be safe.

The niece-nuzzling time certainly has its rewards though. Last night Mol and I took turns reading aloud at bedtime and both of us performed the piece in animated British accents. Blimey, the little wanker is good! I don’t think I’ve ever been more proud of her than I was listening to her deliver a big book of animal facts as though it was a National Geographic documentary. The kid is funny which is really much more important than having manners or proper wiping technique ( both of which---I will clarify because she’s almost nine and it would be disturbing were it not the case--- she has). Bottom line, I just like the kid which soooooo helps when it comes to the whole not-beating-her thing.

The first night I stayed over Mol didn’t sleep in the bed with me which is a departure from my typical stay-the-nights which always have her asking me,”Lola, can I sleep in your bed tonight?” as soon as I walk in the door. I was sure to let her whenever she asked because I knew it wouldn’t last forever, and when she stayed in her own room that first night I was sure it was the end of our slumber parties. (Were she not the type who sleeps horizontally I might have been broken up over it.) But last night she returned to my side (as in, her feet in my side) and first thing this morning she asked if she could sleep with me again tonight. I won’t lie, I love it. There is such a peace to looking over from my book and seeing her sweet little freckly face.

Yesterday I drove Mol and a pal to dance class and realized I’ve been picking these kids up from school and schlepping them to that studio since they were three years old. On the drive over, Mol’s friend, A, told me she had been telling another fourth grade girlfriend how Lola was picking her up from school and that I was---and these are A‘s words---”so awesome.” She used her stretched arms to indicate just how awesome she explained me to be. To which Mol remarked, “Did you tell her she’s my aunt?”

Fourth graders---my target demographic.

When I dropped Mol off this morning and she showed me a flash of too-cool-for-Lola, I lectured her, “Remember, the girls are talking about me on the playground these days. Your aunt is sooooo awesome.” Then, after she jumped out of the car and was heading into school I rolled down my window and started shouting, “I love you, Molly! I’ll miss you! Have a good day! You’re the best little girl in the world! Be sure to use a napkin at lunchtime! I love you!” She laughed and smiled back at me.

Sooooo awesome.

Hopefully she still feels this way after the rest of our time together. I am as tired as it gets from all this house-hopping. No, this is not true. I just left a house where my sister was taking care of a two-year-old and a newborn...I could be a breastfeeding zombie, which I am not. (Not a bad idea for a Halloween costume though.) But it’s all catching up to me and l look forward to locking myself in my apartment for several weeks once all of this done. I suppose I’ve just recognized the rhythm of my life---surges of family and friend-focused energy and output followed by plunges into isolation. I guess that’s just how I do.

But just so we’re clear, I’m not leaving you guys hanging on summer camp stories. I've got something in the works though I may have to wait to post it until I get home again. I want the time and quiet to release it naturally and gently. But it’s coming, I swear. I need to relive it on paper to be sure it really happened.

Guys, it was sooooo awesome.