Oh Man! The Cleaner

Michael Cain says:

My mother and father told a story from early in their marriage. Dad was a senior petty officer in the Navy and was complaining at some point about a group of sailors who were cleaning their living space for the third time because it wasn’t good enough. Somehow they ended up with a competition — Mom would clean their small apartment while Dad was gone for three days, and he would inspect it when he got back. The inspection standard was Dad would put on his white gloves, and if he could smudge them in two of the first three places he looked, he won.

He smudged the glove in the first two places he looked: on top of the door molding inside the linen closet and the back of the supply pipe for the kitchen faucets. Happily, the marriage survived. When my sister and I were kids charged with cleaning something we would occasionally ask, “Mom clean, or Dad clean?”Report