Hot Water

You know you’re getting old when the most mundane activities trigger the most random memories.

• Biting into an orange that sprayed my grandmother which triggered a storytime monologue about how an orange was her favorite Christmas present as a child during the great depression because fruit was incredibly hard to come by.
• At an Octoberfest party in graduate school, a ripe smelling hippie christened my dirty rain-soaked shoes with vomit. The putrid odorous seasoning triggered the memory of me riding my first city bus in San Antonio. I was in 1st grade and sitting across the isle from a smelly homeless man.

This morning was such a moment. I was boiling water for oatmeal with one of those steel electric water kettles that just plug into the wall and clicks off when it boils. This triggered a memory I haven’t thought about in a decade.

I turned on an electric water kettle boiling water for tea. I walked out of the small kitchen into the dining room to clear off the table where I’d had a rather festive dinner party with friends the night before. All summer, I had been house-sitting for a famous Italian opera singer who had a home in Leipzig, Germany.

(Hilarious side-note: She was actually from Wisconsin but worked in Germany to teach at a music school but lived in Italy where she sold herself as a Tuscan to boost her career.)

The dining room was a vast space with hardwood floors, an Imperial Bösendorfer piano (the finest and largest piano in the world with an extra octave at the bass), a vast window that opened up to her gardened 3rd floor terrace overlooking the famed Clara-Zetkin Park, and a giant white fur area rug that looked like it had been skinned from a yak that was cross-bred between an angel and a clydesdalesque unicorn tripping on acid. (It felt good between the toes. What else can I say?)

Walking around the table with piled dishes covered in dried remnants of risotto in one hand and the smudged glasses lined with the dandruff of red wine in the other, I froze in terror. Her villainous fluffy white cat (more the lovechild of a lama and demon) was projectile vomiting bubbly white chunks all over the angelic toe-flossing rug that could easily have cost $100,000.

Screaming like a little girl, I threw the dishes back on the table and chased the possessed mushi into the bathroom where I locked it up until I calmed down.(Mushi is German for “pussy” – it’s what my guests called her because we didn’t know it’s name. I had only heard it referred to with an operatically sung “my perfect little angel.”)

As I was furiously scrubbing the gut-melted cheese that had been left out over night, rubbing the white hair straight off the rug, I became distracted by the audible continuous cleansing of the cheese-allergic mushi and the whistling electric tea kettle that apparently didn’t have an automatic off switch. I ignored both of them until I was done scream-cussing and degooing the expensive floor cloud.

I regathered the dirty dishes and went back to the kitchen. I’d forgotten that the whistling kettle was not the same high-pitched stress steaming in my brain. It took me until I was completely done cleaning everything before I realized that the tea kettle had spent its entire boiling session against the wall under the cabinet, steam-burning the cabinet above it.

Over the course of the next few days, the cabinet bubbled and peeled like an untreated 3rd-degree burn and the spot I scrubbed on the rug had turned into a balding, moldy blue. I was so stressed out over the next week trying to figure out what to do about it that I became increasingly frantic and clumsy.

By the end of the week, the chaos had snowballed:

•  While doing German pilates on DVD in her living room, I fell backwards through her glass coffee table – shattering it into large pieces all over the other $100,000+ area rug.

• The cat got into cheese again, I have no idea how, and puked on the diva’s California King satin-sheeted bed.

• Playing Missy Elliott loud enough from the living room stereo so that I could hear it while cleaning the bed on the other side of the 5000 square foot condo, I blew all of the speakers. But didn’t realize it until I was investigating “what that smell was.”

• I’d completely forgotten about her gardens on both her terraces. They had shriveled and dried up in the summer heat. I got friends to help me – I didn’t have a green thumb at all. When I went to check on them, they had pulled out all of the plants and thrown them away. The language barrier caused confusion – when they didn’t understand ‘prune’ or ‘weed,’ I went to my dictionary and found the word for ‘weed,’ which was ‘Gras’ in German. They thought I was speaking English and they were removing the exotic plants and replacing them with ‘grass.’

• I’d gone on a blind date with a famous former olympic figure skater for hot chocolate in the city center. He made me incredibly uncomfortable so I ended the date and rode my bike back to the condo. Little did I know, he had followed me in his car and had spent all week stalking me and broke into the building trying to get to me. Cops were called. The neighbors just fell in love with that “clumsy American that wouldn’t stop singing.”

• Using the diva’s husband’s computer for my e-mail, where I was deleting all of the histrionic emails with selfies of the stalker crying, the computer crashed. It was one of those blue, older iMac G3 desktop computers. I rushed it to a computer shop. All of the memory was wiped, allegedly erasing all of his investments information – worth millions.

I called Italy and told her to keep her payment, moved out immediately, and never heard from her again.