Elbow Grease

Elbow grease was in great demand when I was a child. There was very little of it going around, according to my mother. The want of elbow grease explained why our lawn looked so shaggy and weedy. It was why my dad’s car never gleamed in the sun. It was the reason for soggy leaves clogging up our roof gutters, causing huge icicles to form on sunny winter days -- dangerous stalactites that could impale the unwary child while he made snow angels.

My mother was determined to end this crying lack of elbow grease, at least in our own home. And since I seemed to be the most deficient my mother loaded me down with more chores than you could shake a dust mop at. That I ever survived such a household Gulag is a wonder I never cease remembering in my bedside devotions. Especially since mom was never more than ten feet away while I toiled, micromanaging with a sharp eye and a blunt tongue.

Since I got paid a quarter every week for my allowance, which was enough back in those mingy times for me to buy a Coke and a Superman comic book at the corner drugstore, I knew I had to mow the lawn once a week. And I did. But we had a push mower, which was propelled by yours truly and continually came to a sudden, chest crushing halt whenever it encountered a twig or even a particularly tough dandelion. The blades were as rusty and dull as an old knock-knock joke.

So I was compelled to mow the cursed grass not once, but twice. Once up and down and then again back and forth. And pluck up the dandelions as I did so.  Mom kept a beady eye on me from inside the house, and if I came across a rough patch of crabgrass that refused to surrender to the push mower and tried flipping the mower over, so the blades still made the same cutting noise but didn’t touch anything, a window sash would fly open and I would be commanded to go back over that particular patch, and to use some elbow grease. To paraphrase Patrick O’Brian in his Aubrey/Maturin sea novels,  “Simon Legree ain’t in it!”

The same held true for putting up and taking down the storm windows each year. Back in those dark ages each window had two sets of frames -- the inner frame, which did not come out, and the outer frame which had to be changed  from a screen frame to a heavy glass frame in the fall before the blizzards came roaring down from Canada. Those damn glass frames must have weighed nearly ten pounds each -- they were wood, not aluminum. As I took each one out I had to wash it before putting it in the garage, too. I was never too enthused about rubbing the Windex in very hard -- and so once again my mother’s cry reverberated around my poor head:  Elbow grease! More elbow grease! Leave no smudge behind!

The Minnesota winter snows smothered our sidewalk in a fiendishly regular fashion, and guess what? Yep, I had to use plenty of elbow grease to ensure the sidewalks were scrapped clean so no leftover snow could melt and form treacherous icy patches on which the mailman or, heaven forbid, Aunt Ruby might slip when she came for a visit.

When at last I escaped from the tyranny of elbow grease and joined the circus, I wallowed in the dust and smudgeness of my roomette on the Ringling train. These were nearly antique train cars to begin with -- our train car, nicknamed the Iron Lung, had been built in 1922, and by the time I moved into my little roomette in 1972, with the horsehair couch that turned down into a murphy bed, it had acquired a dignified patina of grime that I did nothing to disturb. My own personal hygiene was unimpeachable, you understand; but it gave me a great deal of satisfaction to sit amidst my cobwebs and dust bunnies on the train, reveling in my complete freedom from elbow grease.

But sadly enough when I became a parent myself I couldn’t resist dinning that evil old phrase into the ears of my own innocent little children.

“Put some elbow grease into it!” I yelled at them when they raked the autumn leaves.

“Try some elbow grease!” I advised, when their energy flagged while doing the dishes.

And now . . . well, and now I’m in a Senior Living apartment, all by myself. I have a vacuum and I have a mop, and plenty of rags and Windex and Mr. Clean. And by rights I should be cleaning the toilet to get rid of that stubborn hard water ring inside the bowl instead of writing this insubstantial fluff. But I seem to be all out of elbow grease at the moment. I wonder if you can order it online at Amazon.com?