May 5, 2020 Bonus: DIY Pandemic Ideas That Make Me Frown -

In 1962, Peg Bracken published The I Hate to Housekeep Book, and I must have run into it a few years later, on the wall of our den downstairs.

(Ooh, the “den”: is that a 1960s term, or what? In our house, the den doubled as the guest room (long and skinny, only wide enough for a single bed) and also the library (one long wall was entirely books, floor to ceiling). The single bed actually touched the bookshelves along one side, rendering a few shelves pretty well inaccessible, and you could barely get between the other side of the bed and the other wall. The den was narrow, dark, and cold – I think it had no heat vent. It was also a bit magical, for all that.  You could almost hide out in there, and have a private read.

Two memorable things happened in the den:

In 1965, the Seattle Earthquake (that’s what we called it – apparently it was the "Puget Sound Earthquake") made all those books fall off all those shelves. That was a project.

And maybe five years later, the den performed its longest guest room stint, for a physician colleague of my mom’s. I don’t remember his name and only dimly what he looked like, but he was from someplace “back East.” We knew he was coming, and he had a story about needing to be in Seattle for a week or two, for work reasons, but then at the first dinner after his arrival, he announced that the story was a ruse: he had unfortunately developed a heroin addiction, and after much thought, had decided the optimal place he could safely and privately (far from “back East”) go cold turkey was in our den, with my physician-mom around to intervene if need be.  The atmosphere got very tense. John and I were invited to let the adults talk amongst themselves. Then he did move into the den for a while. My mother was in a black mood about it, I believe mostly on the grounds that he might have ASKED.)

But back to I Hate to Housekeep.  It was funny, in the Phyllis Diller/Erma Bombeck vein of mild protest against the conformity and gender imperatives of the fifties and early sixties. I remember two chapters I found hilarious.

One was called something like “Solutions That Make Things Worse,” and in it Bracken railed against the advice given a woman who wrote in to a popular Household Hints columnist, fretting that her ice cube trays stuck to the freezer floor. Peg felt the answer was to wiggle them until they came unstuck. (Ice cube trays and freezer floors were both metal, back in the day.) The advice columnist, though, instead suggested lining the freezer with sheets of newspaper soaked in olive oil. Peg said, and I could not but agree, that this portended a much larger mess.

The other chapter covered “Unsavory Suggestions,” one of which was to use old pantyhose to strain out berry seeds when making jelly instead of jam. I liked “unsavory” to describe the old-pantyhose-and-food concept.

And so I thought of Peg Bracken when I saw this video. My first thought was “At last, something I can do with those single socks I haven’t tossed!” and my nearly simultaneous second thought was, “Feet on my face? Plus, aren’t the heels of everybody’s old socks a bit unsightly?”