There are a

few things I can count on in life: death, taxes, seeing

Elian Gonzales on every news report and the bathroom

closet at my mom's house never changing.

There are simple shelves

with our whole family history in there. On the floor of

the closet is a makeshift hamper. It was a modest

concept. My mother made it easy for any of one of my two

sisters, two brothers or myself to just pick up our

clothes and place them inside the door, on the floor.

Only problem: That modest

concept worked about as well as Internet security at

Yahoo. Seemingly with the will of a pack of Afghan

rebels, none of us kids would put our dirty clothes

there. It was if we had all gotten together and

determined that any bare spot on any bedroom floor was a

more fitting place.

Today still, the empty void

awaits.

The first shelf up in the

closet is for first aid. There are at least six shoe

boxes of medical supplies. One is typical flu and cold

drugs, though a fever in our house had to reach at least

104 before my mom would administer something as

precarious as aspirin.

My mom had a particular

fear of drugs. She took my little sister Missy to the

hospital and had her stomach pumped once when she thought

she had eaten a whole bottle of baby aspirin. Upon

returning we discovered they had just fallen behind the

refrigerator. I guess my mom thought my sister had also

devoured the actual bottle.

Once before that, even, she

had taken my twin, Mike, to the hospital for putting a

button up his nose. (I know this has nothing to do with

medical supplies but I like to tell that story on him any

chance I get.)

There is a box, too, with

antiseptics for cuts and burns and the like. Funny,

though, my mom would always bypass such

"cooling" supplies like triple antibiotic or

first aid cream, for straight alcohol. If any of us

needed more than just that acid bath she would apply

Merthiolate. Not Mercurochrome, the medicine modern

science had invented without the sting, but its big

prickly sister. The rest of the boxes contained what

seemed to be leftover field supplies from my dad's

hitches in World War II and the Korean War.

Shelf two in the closet

holds towels. To this day I have an obsessive compulsive

habit because of those towels. I collect them, store

them, hoard them, use as many as I get my hands on. It is

because when I grew up, you would have thought the ones

in our house were remnants of the Shroud of Turin.

First, my mom inventoried

them as though they were gold (in my seventh grade year

the Federal Reserve Bank sent experts to copy her

techniques). Second, she only had those small towels

about the size of the ones the swimmers use in the

Olympics. And then, she always washed them in fabric

softener so they would not absorb water. Seemingly, you

would just use them to push the water around on your body

until the friction caused evaporation.

Shelf three still contains

linens: sheets and pillowcases and blankets. And, oh, the

blankets! It's ironic we have so many blankets

considering the stinginess about towels. You could be

bleeding to death and needing a tourniquet and my mom

wouldn't give you a towel (I guess she figured the

alcohol would do the trick). But, don't worry cause if

you fell into shock she could pour on the spreads like

syrup on Rosie O'Donnel's pancakes.

The top shelf was mostly

just for spare towels (hermetically sealed in plastic)

and blankets. It's funny how the closet shrunk over the

years. When I was a kid I had to use a chair to see on

the top shelf. Now it holds no mystery at all except that

my mother had "her" way of caring for us and

that's a mystery I'm finally beginning to understand.

[Visit Billy Murphy on

the Internet at https://billymurphy.homepage.com/00/closet.htm .]