When I first told my mother that we had decided on the name “Clementine” for our first child, her response was immediate: “Oh, no,” she said. “You can’t name her Clementine: when I was growing up we had an ironing lady named Clementine, and one time we caught her in the kitchen drinking Scotch and milk.” As you probably know by now, I didn’t take my mother’s advice; if anything, her story made me more determined than ever to name my daughter Clementine, or, as I told my mother, “You had me at Scotch.”
However, even though the Scotch and milk part has proven to be the most interesting part of the story, it has not (of yet) been the part that has been the most relevant; as enchanting as the whole idea of Scotch and milk is, the part that mattered was the ironing, because that is the part of the Clementine legacy that has come to haunt me.
I am not the ironing sort: so far I have never owned an iron in my life (unless of course you want to count the hot pink crimping iron I owned back in the eighties, but since that comes from the same era as Hairstyles-of-Which-We-Must-Not-Speak, I really don’t think it would be quite sporting of you to count it). I had hoped to never own one in the future, as well–but then Clementine joined he Girl Scouts.
Being a Girl Scout involves lots of things: learning fun, new skills; completing exciting projects; and going on interesting field trips–all of which, it seems, entitle the girl in question to a patch. An iron-on patch. At first it didn’t seem so bad: a patch here, a patch there–I just put them aside into a “to be done later” pile while I continued to encourage Clementine in her patch-earning spree; after all, earning patches is fun, isn’t it?
Eventually, however, Clementine began to notice that as the other girls’ vests started filling up with patch after patch, hers was still a barren wasteland frequented only by her lone (pin-on)star. After a meeting where the other mothers began to talk about ordering bigger vests so that they would have room for all of the patches, and where Clementine looked like a Quaker in a room full of Las Vegas showgirls, I finally decided it was time for me to bite the bullet: it was time for me to iron.
At this point, some people would have decided to buy an iron; I, on the other hand, decided to call up one of my friends with a real job: I figured that the same friend I had gone to for help in tying Clementine’s Gryffindor tie for her Hermione costume would probably also be the one most likely to own an iron. My theory was that while some of the boys were taken aside and shown how to get the motor oil out from underneath their fingernails with a pen knife, others (like my friend) were shown the dual arts of ironing and tie tying.
It turns out that I was correct. Unfortunately, however, I took the third career track: hanging out with the English teachers in the break room. This gave me no usable skills whatsoever–not mechanical, and not professional, which would explain how I managed to kill the iron.
Well, kind of explains it: it is a little hard to come up with a plausible explanation for someone with two degrees attempting to iron something sticky side up. The two degrees did, however, come in handy for figuring out that this was 1) not going to work and 2)was very, very bad for both irons and friendships.
Perhaps the Girl Scouts could update their friendship song to reflect this: “Make new friends, but keep the old–and don’t let Kelly Poe borrow your iron under any circumstances.”