Examining old fantasy shows hidden riches of modern life

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

I used to have this fantasy, when my children were small, that one day I would walk into the kitchen and it would be clean. Scrubbed clean, the way my mother used to do her kitchen. Not just a quick wipe here and a spray of Windex there, but waxed and "Jubileed" to high gloss, the counters free of stuff, the curtain washed and starched.

Starch. Now that's a word from another era. It was blue and you added it to the wash during the final rinse and when you took the clothes in from the line (rope strung between two trees on which clean clothes were pinned to dry), they were as stiff as cardboard.

My mother washed and starched and ironed. She worked full time. She cleaned her own house. She shopped, cooked, gardened. She drove me to school and my father to work and then went to work herself selling hats. She was on her feet all day, yet she managed to stay up every night to watch Jack Paar then get up before dawn the next day and begin the routine again.

I wish I could sit her down at her kitchen table, not mine - which is always covered with newspapers and keys and stuff that doesn't belong there - and ask her how she did it all and what I am doing wrong. Or maybe, more specifically, where I went wrong. I can clean a room, but I can't keep it clean. I can do what's on my to-do list for a single day, but not every day.

I was at a function the other night. (My mother never went to a function. She went to the Elks on Saturday nights when I was in my teens, but that was it. No functions, no dinner parties, no movies or dates with my father. No nightlife, no real life of her own.) Anyway, there I was thinking about how it was getting late and how I better call home and check my messages because if I checked them any later I wouldn't be able to call anyone back. And I had this vision, this memory really, of an old black phone sitting on a shiny red countertop, in a tiny kitchen, ringing away in an empty house. People would call and if you weren't there, they hung up and called back later. There were no message machines or call forwarding or star 69 or cell phones or pagers.

And though I love all these things and depend upon them and know I wouldn't want to live without them, they steal your time.

There was only one window in our kitchen, over the sink, a little thing so small my mother had to drive from Randolph to Norbregas in Cambridge, or maybe it was Somerville, to buy curtains for it. Twenty inches from the sill to the middle. The curtains were hard to find. My father built a whoopee room, that's what they called it, a fancy word for a paneled cellar. He built it in his spare time. How is it he had spare time? He worked two jobs. He mowed the lawn and trimmed the bushes and painted the house and the trellis and planted the rose bushes that grew up and around and through it.

A man comes and paints our cellar. Another man comes and trims the bushes and a long time ago a bunch of men came and put vinyl siding on the house so it would never need painting again.

Do we watch more TV? Is that where our time goes? I don't think so. My mother watched TV every night. Do we spend more time in our cars? Not really. We spend a lot more time in traffic but we have highways now where we can speed along, not old winding routes where you could never go above 40.

We have the Internet and e-mail. This takes time. But we use it mostly to message family and to keep in touch with friends. And we spend more time on weekends and vacations, being with family and friends. And it is this, I think, that is the difference.

My mother never spent time just being with someone. She was always busy doing something. She never went out with friends, not even her best friend. They were both too busy, sweeping and ironing and making sure that their families had clean clothes and balanced meals. They worked all the time. They didn't play. Like most women of their time, they were too busy to play. They hardly even talked on the phone.

A friend calls and says "Will you?" and my to-do list is forgotten. A child says, "Listen to me," or "Come here. I need you," and who cares if the kitchen's a mess?

I have a picture of my kitchen table covered with Play-Doh. Christopher is in it and Sarah and Julie. They have rolled out dough, pink and green and yellow, and fashioned squishy letters and spelled out their names. The picture is real, snapped in the days when I used to fantasize about a clean kitchen. All three kids are smiling.

I look at it today and think that I'm glad I never got what I wanted, a spotless kitchen without a sign that anyone had ever been there.