THE ROOF JOB

We went out to eat a couple of nights ago at Pizza Hut. Yeah, it was a BIG NIGHT OUT. The conversation turned to new friends on facebook, of which there have been A LOT lately, which is totally awesome. One of those new friends is a girl, I mean woman, who lived around the corner from my family when we lived in Florida back in the 70s. This is why I said girl and not woman. Back then she was a girl. Of course, she was two years older than I was, but still. My mom knew her, and her family, and we were both excited by the reconnection. Mom then says, "Do you remember the time that I cleaned the roof?" Keep in mind that there are lots of things that mom remembers and I don't, and vice versa. As an aside, I am always amazed and surprised by those things! This had lots of potential to be one of those stories given my age at the time. My answer was, "You bet I do and I am still mad about it!"

Mom was taken aback. That wasn't where she was going with HER story. She says, "Well, let me tell my story and then we can get to you and your issues." I nod. "I was up on our roof cleaning it with bleach and Jody could see our house from her backyard." All of this explanation was for Steve who wasn't there. I needed no explanation. I remembered exactly where Jody lived. "She told me that she was sitting at her backyard picnic table when she saw me on the roof, and called to her parents telling them they wouldn't believe it. By the time they got outside, I had crested the peak and was on the other side. Her parents looked at her like she making up stories." Mom laughs at this funny memory of the roof job. I can't help but smile. It is funny. If I didn't have my own issues with the roof job, it would have been funnier. I can see Jody's parent's in my mind's eye coming out expecting to see my mom on our roof and there being no one there. At that point, they have to be thinking is our kid taking us for a ride, or what? How gullible does she think we are? Jan on the roof? Ha!

The thing is I probably wouldn't even remember the roof job were it not for my favorite purple jammies. Those are the only jammies I remember from my entire childhood. I loved the color purple and I adored those jammies. I liked them so much that I wore them at times that I probably shouldn't have been wearing them... like in the backyard when my mother was using bleach to clean the roof. What I don't remember is if I was out there making a nuisance of myself, or if was out there helping in some way. The only thing that is clear in my mind is the bleach coming into contact with my purple jammies. That is vivid for me. Did you know that undiluted bleach will completely remove the color from clothing? I did not know that until that day. When that bleach took the purple out of my jammies, leaving behind a spray pattern of little white dots, I understood precisely how bleach worked.

After I told my jammies story my mother told me how bad she felt about the bleach and my jammies (again). Apparently we went through this ad nauseum at the time of the incident. It is true what they say: there is no use crying over spilled bleach.