The Dog Ate My Washer, and other odd things

We own an every-other-year timeshare, so this was our last family trip to Arizona until 2012, a year that feels as long away as the year 2000 did when I was a kid. Back then, I tried to imagine how the world would be in 40 years, convinced we would be in definitely be in flying cars like George Jetson. Or living in thousand story silver towers with connecting monorails and eating nutrition pills instead of actual food. As for the rest of the picture, I wasn't so sure. Unlike the vision of the future from Orwell or Wells, our technological and social advances went in strange directions, more organic to our nature than these futurists imagined. Although I wouldn't have said this as little as a decade ago, Big Brother is certainly present, but not in a clunky, flying camera way. The messengers of information turned out to be as mysterious as bacteria once were to the medical field; in this case, electronic signals that have created a 3-D digital world of surveillance and loss of personal privacy.

I'm not thrilled with the loss of privacy but there has been one silver lining in the Big Brother age: our ability to find the answer for just about anything by digging into the ever-expanding digital world of shared information. I'm an unabashed answer-nut and dip into this well often. But search engines can't answer everything, nor can they prepare us for the unexplained.

Take the the odd things that have cropped up as 2010 begins to roll.

First was the strange leak in our washing machine that happened just as the New Year dawned. The full size washer/dryer stack is my pride and joy and a welcome release from the drudgery of slogging laundry to the laundromat. It's a new-ish Maytag, front loader, a water-efficient unit that slaps the clothes around a fair bit. Built to last of course: we splurged on this, and a whole phalanx of energy-star appliances when we renovated our home, certain repairs would be in the far, faraway future.

So I was taken aback when, just before we left for our holiday, the washing machine flooded and turned our laundry room into a wading pool. Water was pouring from the bottom of the front door in buckets, (and perhaps elsewhere) and I couldn't figure out why. The 2 year warranty had just expired, of course, and calls to the famous Maytag Repairman, yielded frightening news: Pots of money just to take a look, with the expectation that pots more would be needed to fix whatever was causing the catastrophic leak. No wonder he's lonely....

Not wanting to spend pots of money right before a vacation (there goes my once-a year massage at the spa), I called in the local calvary - two guys from the Italian section of our town who have a ratty looking (read cheap) appliance repair shop on the main thoroughfare. Frick and Frak came out as promised, and after poring over the Maytag manual, examined the motor and various parts of the machine with silent concentration. Then Frick stood back to show me the problem: A semi-circular chunk was missing from the rubber washer that separated the drum from the door. Why hadn't I seen this? Second shock: It looked suspiciously like bite mark. And was dog-height from the floor.

"That there is your problem," said Frick, as both men regarded me solemnly. It was then I remembered seeing a half-moon piece of grey rubber on the floor next to the dog beds, picking it up and saying, "Huh, what the heck is this?" and then throwing it in the garbage.

Frack spoke from his position sprawled on the floor (where he was putting the front back on the motor). "This is a really expensive part - like around $200.00."

"What do I do?" I wailed. I knew these guys wouldn't try to rip me off.

Frick shrugged. "Well, if you find that piece of rubber, you could try gluing it back in place with some silicone." I knew the Maytag Repairman would never have made this suggestion. I warmed up to my visitors.

"Okay," I replied, with some hope of salvaging a bad situation, and they got up, accepted the $20.00 I had in my wallet as payment for their diagnosis (Maytag wanted $70.), and left.

Then I went out back, found all the garbage bags, and pulled on some rubber gloves.

Yup, this is what we homeowners call 'adjusting to the realities of life during very expensive renovations that go on for ten years because you can't afford to do them in one'.

Like a good CSI, I meticulously separated and examined every mangled piece of paper, orange rind, eggshell, and slimed assortment of unrecognizable food items, in a painstakingly slow process. I was determined to find that 2" piece of curved rubber, bite marks and all, no matter how long it took. Two hours later, I gave up.

The repair service for Maytag (I wasn't about to entrust this job to two guys who needed a manual to check the motor) gave me the bad news on the overall cost, and I took it on the chin, including the snickers about how the dog ate our washing machine. Then I had to tell my husband, who fortunately has bonded with the little ball of dirt we fondly call our Shorkie, and who has forgiven many previous incidents involving donuts, our cooler, and (we think) the bowl of strawberries on our dining room table. Oh, and the $50.00 frantic calls to the Animal Poison Control Center to make sure the items weren't going to kill our little dear.

Everything was duly fixed when we came home from Arizona, the money kissed goodbye, and I'm back happily washing clothes.

But other mysteries keep cropping up, and some have yet to be solved.

Like the little buttonhole inside the pocket of Mimi's hoodie. Just the left pocket, not the right. You can stick your finger in there and tickle her tummy. Other than that, the reason for it has me stumped. If you think you can figure out why it's there, please let us know.

No garbage-hunting required.

And In This Corner....

So, here I am at the in-laws.

Grandma/Obaachan - she dotes on Mimi and gives her the requisite hugging, heart-to-heart chats, and lap time that a young, loving, grandchild deserves. She is typical of her generation of post-war Japanese immigrants - reserved, patient, self-sufficient. I may not want to be her, but I can find a lot to admire, and I see these traits in my husband, whom I love, love, love.

Grandpa Grumpy, or Grumps, is a different matter entirely. I've already given you the short version of our rocky relationship. He's a bully and I'm learning not to be his punching bag.

It didn't start out this way - when Bob first brought me to the Kansas property where his mother and her husband (his step-father) spend their summers, I found my future father-in-law to be garrulous but charming in a rustic kind of way. In his late 70's, he was a strapping farm boy made good who had travelled the world with the military (then later with the civil arm of the military), spoke a few Asian phrases (Japanese, Chinese, Korean). He was very handy with firearms, which I admit I found fascinating because I'd lived up north in the bush where hunting for food was a way of life. Done respectfully, it was a proper skill.

During that visit we toured the thousand acres he had bought back after his settler family had lost it during the Depression. He valued his ancestral roots, and as he ambled through the forested acres pointing out native birds and the sudden glimpse of a white-tailed doe, I appreciated how hard he had worked to live the comfortable life as a landowner and raconteur of his many travels. He taught me how to shoot a rifle (something his other daughters in law refused to do), and showed us the several hundred acre parcel he had deeded to the government for a wildlife refuge (hunting rights reserved, of course).

Trouble began once we started visiting as a married couple. Grumps and Obaachan, both retired from senior positions at the PX (stores on military bases), lived the other half of the year in a large modern home chock-full of antiques and collectibles they had purchased during their separate tours (some of them no doubt from post-war refugees without a pot to piss in). Grumps had been married twice - once to a Japanese woman during the tumultuous post-war period overseas when such things were frowned on, and again in the 1990's to Bob's mother, also Japanese. The key to what made Grumps interesting, and then soured into a bitter pill, was his obsession with proving to everyone what a admirable human being he was, how brave, how clever, how adventurous, how industrious, and above all, not racist. In short, everything became about Grumps. To this day, he shows absolutely no interest in, empathy with, or compassion for anyone else, unless, and this is a big unless.... they are Japanese.

You could bring Freud back from the dead with this interesting head case. Grumps, who had seen the devastation wrought by WWII in the Pacific Theatre, seems to have taken on the psychic wrench of American guilt after the atomic bombings in Japan. He missed the active war by a few months, arriving in time to be an M.P. for the occupying forces, even part of the clean-up crew in Nagasaki. There he saw families reduced to skin and bones from the poverty of war, villages bereft of men (all gone to graves), farms without fields of food, empty baskets, and loss, much loss and grief.

What he never saw was the other side; a close friend being shot or disemboweled in the heat of battle, prison camps for women and children, the mass murder of Chinese in Manchuria, the death marches, thousands of men going down in ambushed ships in Pearl Harbor. The horrible poison of war that visited hell on everyone caught up in the conflict. The American sacrifices, all abstract images to him, are only invoked when he wants to underscore his argument that America must engage in war, no matter what the ideology, no matter what the cost.

So here we are, sixty years on, and Grumps has gathered around him what he knows and believes in most - Japanese-Americans. I think it has something to do with cleaving to a culture that will put up with him. He and Obaachan live in a community of nisei, or second generation, all very nice, all very polite. If they are bored or offended by his endless self-agrandizement and he-haw jokes at other people's expense, they don't show it. He, in turn, is a broken record when it comes to how much these people should be applauded for having the good sense to be American Citizens.

Which brings me to one of the sticking points between me and Grumpy. Here is a guy who lived half his life in other countries as an American ex-pat, and yet he cannot stop harassing me about why I haven't become a citizen here in the U.S. In his eyes, there is no better place on earth, and while he touts the American dream, also denigrates my home country (and entire family still living there) as poor, spineless, socialist second cousins. Hmmm, I wonder why I wouldn't want to call myself his compatriot?

I don't bring these things up - and when he tries to bait me, I let it go. This isn't the bullying I'm talking about. No, it goes much deeper, down into the psyche of a man who at his core is exactly what a bully is: a sad, insecure soul who is terrified of being bullied himself. I know this because in the seven years I've known him I've heard the same stories over and over and over again about what a fabulous, hardworking, brave, savvy, smart, clever, un-prejudiced person he has been in every single situation in his life. He never stops talking. Never. It's as if he is afraid that if he does, something will come into the void and bowl him over.

When we brought Mimi home, the bullying intensified and grew to encompass everything we were as parents, as a couple. Our choices about where we lived, how we lived, how we raised our daughter were endless fodder for his judgement. He ignored us most of the time we visited, except when he wanted to pontificate about his view on child rearing, or to instruct me on my duties as a daughter-in-law. Though he never graced the kitchen with his presence, he was like a hawk, waiting for any perceived slight on my part if I wasn't fast enough to help out with cooking or cleaning. Sometimes his back-handed insults about my lack of character were so stinging I often had to hold back tears, I was so humiliated. If he was finished pontificating, he made real conversation impossible by turning up the television so loud we were forced to leave the room. And his only comments to Mimi were so laced with sarcasm that she instinctively stopped going near him and focused her attention on the old lady with waiting arms and a kind word.

So this brings me to our Christmas visit. I knew I'd reached the end of my rope with Grumps, so on this visit I decided I would start by just ignoring him. But as I mentioned in my previous column, the old man surprised us all and seemed happier than I'd known him in years. I relaxed and we had a pleasant dinner, even engaging in the kind of light-hearted exchanges like the early days. I felt hopeful.

The next morning, I was up early. The rest of the house was quiet and I started catching up on some reading. Grumps came down and sat across from me in his leather recliner. He took off his socks, stretched out his big, gnarly feet on the foot rest, and stared at me with a familiar glittering eye and Cheshire cat smile. I felt the old sense of doom invading the space like the early morning darkness. This is it.

I can't tell you exactly how the conversation started, but it wasn't long before the needling accusations began. It isn't important to go into the specifics, they were the same things he'd been pushing at us for years. All assumptions, because he'd never actually asked us anything about our lives. All judgments, none of them good.

I took the old guy head on. Didn't lose my temper, but I did get a little teary-eyed, which I ignored and pressed on. He thrust, I parried. His voice rose, mine matched his with intent. I kept repeating the same thing, over and over. "If you want to understand something about our lives, just ask. I am happy to answer any and all questions." Although Grumps wasn't particularly interested in the answers, it became abundantly clear that from this time forward, the game plan had changed. There would be no pronouncements and insults in a vacumn. His assumptions would be challenged. And often. And there would be no more impunity for the judge and jury he had become.

In the end, that's what felled the beast.

Grumpy thinks he knows everything about sacrifice. He's got lots of stories on that subject, except that when you peel back the holier-than-thou visage, you realize he's a healthy old guy whose lived longer than most with a fat government pension, free healthcare, summer and winter residences, and a ridiculous amount of collectable junk, so much that he filled his own museum with it. Whatever sacrifices he made way back when, pale in comparison to the sufferings around him in the real world, and it wouldn't take much to hold a cold, clear light up to shatter that illusion.

I'm wise enough to know that, and putting my small sacrifices in perspective keeps me honest about how fortunate I am to have all that I do.

The rest of it is just wind.

So go blow, Grumps. Or better yet, just put a sock in it.