That Darn Spot (a.k.a. The Neverending Story)

Mom was a neat freak. There was no doubt about it. Once she went to work little things had to fall by the wayside, like dusting the house each morning, but before that time everything had a feather duster run over it daily. I dreaded weekends because one of my chores was having to take everything off the bureaus and the parlor tables and use a cloth (and sometimes the Pledge); between the bureau scarves, the small gold-framed photos, the knicknacks, clocks, flowers, and of course the saint statues it was a long and tedious job.

(Dad always liked to tell the story about their bedroom. Just as at our house, so it was at my maternal grandparents' house where Mom and Dad lived for four years, saving up to "go housekeeping." As in many Catholic homes, the top of the chest of drawers was lined with religious statues: the Infant of Prague, the Sacret Heart of Jesus, the Blessed Mother. Plus there was a statue of St. Anthony on the bureau and of course a Crucifix over the bed. He used to say he felt downright guilty "doing what comes naturally" in front of Jesus!)

The house also had to be dustmopped daily (thank goodness for hardwood floors!), the parlor vacuumed, the dishes washed and wiped. If doing the dishes or making the beds on a morning we were going downtown might make us miss the bus, we missed the bus! Mother never left a dish unwashed or a bed unmade. I learned to make a bed in two minutes and forty seconds, and that was with the top sheet and blanket tucked in, the bedspread correctly positioned and flat, and the pillows puffed up into long bolsters at the top of the bed with the spread covering it like frosting on a Swiss roll. Plus there was the laundry to be done, and the ironing after that. Mother ironed everything. About the time I got old enough to iron, she had given up ironing panties, men's shorts, and the sheets, but the pillowcases had to be ironed! And not only did I have to iron my pants, but they had to have a crease in them, like Dad's trousers (even the ones he wore to work in the factory every day). No one was ever going to gossip about my Mom's house- and family-keeping!

Back in those days I would spend any time not watching television in the living room in my bedroom, sitting cross-legged on the bed. I had "Lassie," my little 12-inch television set in the window, for some time, then shifted into the corner about the time I went to work and bought my nice wooden art desk, which, of course, became a horizontal magnet, and I seldom used it. Instead I would sit "tailor-fashion" with the beanbag lap desk someone had bought me on my lap, with my pens in their containers and my crayon box on either side of me, and a composition book in front of me, writing stories.

I couldn't write stories in just any old way, on a tablet like John-Boy or Laura Ingalls Wilder. Instead, I bought spiral bound small college-ruled notebooks, first at my favorite drugstore of all time, Thall's Pharmacy on Reservoir Avenue, and then later at Douglas Drugs on Atwood Avenue. (Both of these places fall under Places I Still Miss: Thall's which had TV Guide earlier than anyone else, a big plus when the Fall Preview came out, and Douglas Drugs, where I bought my first copy of "Starlog.") These were written using the beautiful Sheaffer ballpoint cartridge pen Mom bought me when I went to Hugh B. Bain (pens were supplied in elementary school only), with embellishments provided by several sources, including every single color of Flair pen ever made and my "fountain" pen with the black ink (it wasn't a real fountain pen, which you fill from an inkwell, but a cartridge pen). Every so many pages I would illustrate a scene from the story, and then when I finished, two pages of the composition book were left blank. When I did finish, I bent one end of the wire spiral so that I could "unscrew" it, remove the two sheets, and then replace them on top of each of the cardboard covers. I could then make a cover for my book and a teaser for the story on the back, just like a proper novel, and tape the cover papers to the cardboard.

It was the fountain pen which caused all the trouble, because if a fountain pen has one weakness, it's that anything absorbent, like paper—and like cloth—will wick the ink from the nib of the pen if it is laid on that type of surface. So I was very careful, especially after an accident with an old blouse (and thank God it was old), never to leave the fountain pen lying with its point against paper or cloth. Besides, a big blot of ink on paper or cloth meant less ink in the cartridge, and those were expensive. It was in my best interest to be careful.

Nevertheless, one day Mom found a big black spot on one of my sheets. Yes, you can guess what she accused me of doing. In vain I protested that I never left the pen lying on the sheet, that if nothing else it wasted the ink. No, she insisted, it must have rolled away and you didn't see it...there's nothing else that could have made a big black spot like that...on and on. And on and on. And it didn't go away after a week, or a couple of weeks. Every time we changed the beds and the blotted sheet came up, she shook her head at my wastefulness, and I protested that it wasn't my pen..."well, then it was another one of your pens!" was the retort. If something else went wrong and I would protest that it wasn't my fault, she would bring up the ink spot on the sheet. I would never, ever, hear the end of that sheet.

Over the course of another couple of years, tiny black spots appeared on some clothing. Once it was Dad's pants, so Mom figured it was something he had gotten into at work. Polishing jewelry was never a clean job and Dad had to scrub his fingertips with a nail brush when he finished for the day. Once it was on the pocket of my chestnut-colored pants and again came the accusation about the fountain pen. The fact that I usually sat on the bed to write after I'd changed clothes for the night and was in my pajamas didn't appear to dawn on Mom. It was all the fault of that fountain pen! I sewed a cute little bee patch on the pocket and hoped that was the end of it.

So victory was very sweet the day a big black spot showed up on Mom's sheets, and not only one of hers, but on the bottom sheet, which spent 16 hours a day covered up with a flat sheet, a couple of blankets, and a spread, none of which had an ink spot on it. And she knew very well I almost never went into their bedroom, and no one could sit on that bed without making a racket; it had bed springs instead of a box spring and they squeaked like the devil.

Mom was positively gobsmacked. Me, I gloated. "I guess you think I deliberately set my fountain pen down on your bed, right?"

So she called my cousin Timmy, who was a washer repairman. He reported that the clutch was bad on the washer and that would make it, occasionally, leak oil into the tub—which meant that big "ink stain" on my sheets was an oil stain instead.

Needless to say I was pretty happy, having finally vanquished the specter of the leaking fountain pen.

Don't you know that as Mom got older she started telling that old story again? Apparently, some family legends never die...