Lucy and Ethel

“I felt like I was playing Ethel to my mother’s Lucy again last night,” my daughter Barbara announced to the assembled group.

We had just returned from a week of family camping.  “The girls” (my two daughters and my niece Kelly) had slept over, and my sisters Joan and Bev had joined us for breakfast when Barb began recounting the tale of our middle of the night mishap.

In my defense, here’s the story.

It was just after 1:30 in the morning.  Overtired and having a hard time sleeping, I was flopping around from side to side, trying to fall asleep when Barbara cautiously approached the bed and said, “I hate to wake you up, but there’s something wrong with the dishwasher.  It’s overflowing all over the floor.”

“Oh, crap!  It’s probably the gasket again.  It keeps coming undone from around the door,” I grumbled as I got out of bed and found my slippers.  Other than being mildly annoyed, I didn’t think much about it until I saw the pile of suds all over the floor.

A quick peek into the cabinet under the sink confirmed what I had suspected as soon as I saw the nature of the flood.

Just before heading off to bed I had decided to run the full load of dishes so they would all be clean by morning.  Tired and probably not as careful as I should have been, I had automatically reached under the sink, grabbed the box of Cascade and poured it into the little cup on the door, and then took the bottle to the right of it and given a good squeeze of what I thought was the rinse agent into the machine before hitting the buttons to start the cycle and gone to bed.

I am a creature of habit.  I always put the same things in the same place so that even in the dead of night I can easily put my hand on what I want without having to look.  It works just fine unless people not aware of my system put things in something other than their usual place. In this case, the bottle of Dawn dishwashing liquid had been put to the right of the Cascade instead of to the left, resulting in the veritable cascade of suds currently flowing across the kitchen floor.

The wash cycle had only just begun and the dishwasher was knee deep in suds that needed to be dealt with before the machine could be turned back on again.  I tried salting the suds without appreciable success. Barbara’s suggestion of using baking soda didn’t work either.

“So there we were, Lucy and Ethel pulling armloads of suds from the dishwasher and dumping them into the sink!” she continued with much hilarity.  “At least she didn’t have a T.V. to toss onto the stove,” she continued, a reference to a long ago mishap when I had accidentally melted a portable television set on top of my woodstove.

Still laughing and playing to the crowd, she continued.  “You should have seen her riding Nana’s fireplace down the front steps.”

“I didn’t ride it down.  I just got stuck on it,” I tried to explain.

That particular incident had occurred two weeks earlier when Barbara and I were working at my mother’s house, trying to get it cleared out preparatory to putting it on the market.  Much of the furniture had already been removed, leaving only enough to make it attractive for the showing when Barbara suddenly looked at the large artificial fireplace that occupied one wall of the living room.

“Does that have to stay?” she asked.  “The room would look much bigger if it was gone.”

So we wrestled it away from the wall and she was right.  The room looked better without it.

My mother had loved that fireplace, so deciding to dump it was a tough call, but in the end we agreed it had to go.  The problem was that the house sets up from the street with a fairly long flight of cement steps leading down to the street and the fireplace was really heavy.  We discussed it at length before deciding that if we were careful we should be able to just slide it down the stairs.

Barbara took the front since she’s younger, stronger and would be more able to control the slide.  I brought up the rear. We got down the first short group of steps without incident, but as we began our final descent down the long flight, as stepped down my foot missed the step and landed instead on the hearth…the slippery hearth…and slid all the way into the maw of the fireplace, forcing me into an impressive almost full split as I hung on for dear life.  My right foot was firmly planted on the step way behind me, my left foot was stuck in the fireplace in front of me, and I was laughing so hard I couldn’t have helped myself even if it had been possible, which it wasn’t. Barbara couldn’t help because if she let go of her end we would have all gone tumbling down into the street below, fireplace and all.

Fortunately, Lenny, the guy across the street, just happened to come out and noticed our plight, immediately rushing to our aid.

You can judge it for yourselves, but from where I was standing it looked like Ethel was the instigator in that particular escapade.