You Got To Know When To Fold 'Em
by Maggie Van Ostrand
When Kenny Rogers sang, “Ya got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em … “ in his hit, “The Gambler,” he was singing about more than playing cards, he was singing about housekeeping.
With all that’s going on in the world today, I should probably be more upset about unchecked crime, crooked politicians, and the faltering economy. But no, I’ll leave those worries to people who can do something about them. What really concerns me is my laundry, and that I’m unable to fold it as well as my daughter. She really knows “when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.” Nobody does it better, not even the dry-cleaner.
Daughter Paula (that’s not her real name; her real name is Susan :-) can fold T-shirts into a perfect rectangle; one so perfect that whatever printing is on the T-shirt front is precisely centered in the final fold. She can fold fat and fluffy towels so that the ends come together perfectly without using a ruler (like me), and those she folds could be used in a Vogue ad for Cannon Towels. In fact, Paula can actually fold fitted sheets. I’m not making that up. In the few minutes it takes her to finish doing it, you can’t tell the difference between the folded flat sheets and the folded fitted ones. Her corners are as crisp and sharp as the edges of a new envelope. If she ever saw the way I fold things, she might politely say it was I who taught her how to do it. I wouldn’t bother correcting that fib either, because we’d both know that my finest housekeeping hour was figuring out that I could avoid vacuuming by simultaneously opening the back and front doors and waiting for a breeze to blow out the dog's fur balls. I could never even figure out why dust stops accumulating after about two inches.
Everybody has something they can do well, and sometimes life is simply trying to figure out what that thing we do well is. For me, if I can eliminate things I can’t do, what’s left will be my answer. I can’t do calculus or anything else with numbers; I can’t open jars without either a wrench or a man, and I can’t figure out why auto mechanics can talk to men without looking at their chests the way they look at ours. I can’t always understand exactly what poets mean in their poems, can’t cook these days without a pair of scissors, some pliers, and a box of Band Aids, and I don’t get how a battery works even though I read the explanation in an encyclopedia.
However, I may be getting closer to finding out what I can do well because now I'm able to eliminate folding laundry into a decent shape. My folded laundry comes out looking like a bag full of deflated soccer balls left out in the rain. Not only that but, when I do the wash, it takes me much longer than most because I’m constantly having to stop and pluck out bits of disintegrated Kleenex which had been hiding in pockets. They call this progress? In my own mother’s day, they used hankies so if they remained in pockets, they’d get washed at the same time.
Kenny Rogers was right about holding and folding but next time, he should consider lyrics by Erma Bombeck, who once said, The art of never making a mistake is crucial to motherhood. To be effective and to gain the respect she needs to function, a mother must have her children believe she has never engaged in sex, never made a bad decision, never caused her own mother a moment's anxiety, and was never a child. My mistake was not teaching Paula how to fold laundry the way I do.
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