Skip to main content

Toilet Paper! (Jeanne)

 A few days ago, Louie and I were TPed. Whoever did it didn't do a very good job, though. It was enough to remind me of my own teen years and TPing our friends' houses. One time, my friends had hit our house on Aldrich Avenue really hard. My mom didn't like wastefulness and disapproved of TPing. She made me pick up as much of the TP as I possibly could. Stored in brown grocery bags, she made us use it in the bathroom before we were allowed to "get" rolls of toilet paper that were from the store.


Whoever TPed our house last weekend had left a 3/4 roll of paper by the garbage can. Louie asked me what I did with it. "Picked it up and put it in the bathroom upstairs." "You're going to use it?" "Absolutely! It was still dry." Then I thought of my mom and smiled. Perfectly good toilet paper - why throw it away?


I also remember my mom having all three of us girls come into the bathroom so she could demonstrate how to select paper for wiping after tinkling. She removed four - FOUR! - little squares of paper and said that was enough to wipe with. I don't remember exactly how we reacted, but I'm pretty sure we all continued to grab as much as we wanted / needed. Poor mother! Three girls with small bladders - we went through a lot of TP!


With Covid-19 and survivalist hoarders, it's been interesting to try to find TP products. It's easier now than it was in April, but 2020 has been a weird year, no question.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Dad Story: Memories Lost (Jeanne)

It has been two years since my dad died. (Today is 1.22.2018. He died on 1.21.2016.) In getting rid of scraps of paper in my life (de-cluttering; I'm not yet ready for Swedish Death Cleaning!), I found an old receipt with some notes on it. "broken hand" "Dr. Dumont" "St. Joseph nuns" "Campbellton" Google brought me here: St. Joseph Hospital - http://www.rhsj.org/en/former-apostolic-sites_382_-21.php Religieuses Hospitalieres de Saint-Joseph I can't find information on Dr. Dumont (not that I tried that hard . . . ) but here's what I remember of that conversation with my dad over two years ago (I don't have the best memory!). He was talking about bequests after my mom died. He wanted to send money to places that were meaningful to him - the convent where his sister, Sister Beatrice, served, for example. He also mentioned Dr. Dumont, who had fixed his "broken hand" when he was a kid. He said they couldn'...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gum and Thriftiness and Pronunciation and Honesty (Jeanne)

Eileen was a very thrifty gal. She bought CareFree sugarless gum and would willingly share it. A half piece at a time. Seriously! Since gum loses its flavor relatively quickly, she thought it was wasteful to take an entire piece, no matter how long you would chew it. So she would tear the piece in half and hand it out as though it were a special treat. Even Jenifer remembers this about her!  When her grandson Morgan was preschool age, he pronounced the word "Num." Grandma Eileen said, "Gum. G - g - g - g - gum. With a hard G. You say it." And Morgan said, "G - g - g - g - num!" It was hilarious! He wasn't doing it to be a stinker; he just had trouble with the word. But she kept trying! When Jeanne was five-ish years old, Eileen said "No" at the grocery store to buying her a pack of gum for herself. Jeanne took one and put all five sticks in her mouth while on the car ride home. Since she was dumb, the wrappers were all there in the bac...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fifteen Minutes of Fame (Louise)

From Louise: In Corpus Crispy (aka Corpus Christi), I was with Eileen and Larry. It was a cloudy day and we had taken chairs down to the pier in their swimsuits with reading material looking for sun anyway. When I saw a TV news van pulling up, I said, "Oh no! This can't be good." It was the afternoon weather report. They wanted to get a shot of the curve of the coastline, showing the weather. They featured us! Frozen Minnesotans."Where are you from?" and all that. When they were done with the spot, we asked about a good place to eat cheap seafood. A local place. So we ate at the place they recommended. When we were checking out, the waitress asked how we heard about them. And we said, "Well the news guy on channel whatever it was . . . " And she said, "Oh! That was you! I saw that!" So we were famous.
Post a Comment
Read more