Poles and Crosses

[captainsblog]

Into Day Seven

A long day around the old barnyard. A constant dreary rain kept the outside daylight down to mere nightlightiness, keeping me out of the house for most of the day. Being out means driving, spending money and stressing about how things are at home, none of them particularly fun pursuits right now.

But there are two odd reports heading into the Shabbos of our first powerless week; and each of them, as both Freud and the singer Melanie each put it, was longer than it was wide.

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Tuesday brought the harshest reality of this storm to date: Ray reached into the top dresser drawer and the CUE alarm went off. That's "certified underwear emergency," for the uninitiated.  This had been delayed until this point only because of a similar CUE this time a week ago, which led to the rather unusual occasion of my having run a full load of wash at midweek last week. Alas, the inevitable could be put off no longer: it was time to return to my bright college days and scope out a laundromat.

I was one of those kids (oh, let's admit it, one of those guy kids) who had barely ever run a load of wash before going off to college, and like many of my male dormmates, had to be initiated into the family of laundress domesticus by the assorted sympathetic, if snickering, freshman girls in the U-Hall 1 laundry room. (Yes, we lived in dorms named for do-it-yourself moving vans. Don't ask.)  By the end of that year, I was an old pro, even knowing which were the good dryers. Most of them were rated on their outer-door rubber seals with ink or car-key carvings as to their potency. "BLAST FURNACE," read a popular favorite. "COLDER THAN PAM IN 1423" was one to be avoided.  I now do virtually all the laundry for three people, proving that there is no such thing as a free load of wash.

Once I arrived in Buffalo for law school, I had to rely on private facilities, since none of my apartments were big enough for a laundry room. For most of those years, I rotated among three, all of which still exist. One, the "Three Sisters Laundromat," which for some reason I insisted on calling the Three Witches Laundromat after the stars of Macbeth, complete with wiccan incantation: "double double toil and trouble, dryer burn and washer bubble." Second, the too-cleverly-named "Washingtown, D.C." Since this was back during the Marion Barry administration, I tended to shy away from it out of fear I'd wind up with crack in my shirt pile. And most to the point today, the far more boring "Coin Laundry" at Sheridan and Harlem. Which, by cosmic coincidence, was the one which wound up, 22 years later, as the closest laundromat to my still-powerless house.

Oh how I've missed the marvelous drill. The out-of-order machines; they may be digital now, but they're just as fragile, apparently. The close quarters. The dropped quarters. The dryer hogs (sows, in more cases than not), who manage to hoard five dryers at once for an average of three pieces of underwear per. And a rate of inflation- I used to knock off two washes/dries for two quarters and five dimes- that rivals the American university system for its two-decade rate of increase.

Still, all of us who were there, from the nearby regulars from Daemen College to the many wayward homeowners in similar straits to mine, all got along pretty famously. We shouted out two-minute warnings on each others' loads; the dibs on dryers got called with near panache; and nobody got their laundry unceremoniously dumped on top of a machine, an experience I'd had, as both dumper and dumpee, many a time back in the day.  The rest of the ambience was a mix of old (overpriced vending machines, most of them empty or broken) and new (allegedly free wifi, even toying with my computer by connecting me to- I am not making this up- "Sudsnet," but not producing any actual internet), but it also added a serious element of strange.

My "dry" was in the upper tier of the double-stacked dryers, which caused me to raise my eye just enough above their usual level to see it. Sitting above all the machines, dead center in the middle of the dryer wall: a crucifix. Complete with bodily pierced Jesus.

There's precedent for this; one of my later off-campus apartments in Ithaca was closest to a place which laid out those tacky "Children's Bible" volumes and Chick tracts next to the wash-sorting tables, giving it the name among us of the "First Baptist Laundromat."  But nobody would have dared lay out Jesus on the wall even there.

So finally, 22 years later, the no-name laundry at Sheridan and Harlem has a name: Our Lady of Perpetual Rinse Cycle.

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Heading home brought other sights of large objects built for the task of hanging.  The Penn Power guys, AWOL since their appearance here late Monday afternoon, were back, and blocking me from getting into my driveway.  But oh, what a happy block. They were delivering a new utility pole to replace, hmmm, I'm not sure which one fell, or is about to, but it was a pretty sight to see something resembling Actual Action on the power repair front.

The crane went up. The pole went gently down onto my cross-street neighbor's lawn. I thought happy thoughts about it being planted, and wires reconnected, and a ribbon being cut by some desperate politician and my power coming back on,....

Um, they stopped at "the pole went gently down." It's still sitting there, no doubt awaiting the pile driver crew which will take it the next stage. Hopefully sometime this month.

But it beats NOT having it there....