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From a guest blogger - Auntie Mauman.
Mormons are forced to pray with their arms folded and to dress a specific way.
By Auntie Mauman
I am an ex-Mormon and after thirty years of whipping children to make them pray with their eyes closed, their heads bowed, and their arms folded tightly I have decided to give it up. Of course, I miss it. After all, the money was good and the hours were short. This is how my ministry worked.
Every month I was given a list by the Bishop of children that were not conforming to the “Mormon Prayer Standard,” and directed to remedy the recalcitrant using ‘any means required’ to bring these wicked children into submission.
There is a special ‘Conformation Area” under every baptismal font in Mormon Church Buildings. The door is accessed by a secret combination lock, called a Gadianton. Only the Conformer – me! - has the key although the Bishop can get in for inspection using the special Kishkumen Rubber pass key, which by passes the secret combination, provided he is up to date with his tithing payments. Some have said that the Gadianton had been banned, but this is wrong. They are thinking of a Band called “The Gadiantons” that used to play in Mesoamerica in the old days before the coming of the railroad.
The Area des Confomrationen has a row of small chairs similar to those use in Primary meetings, except they are connected to mains electricity and are programmed to provide non-lethal electrocution to children that will not close their eyes or bow their heads, or any combination of these two. There is a small toilet area to one side for use after electrocution, because it has been found that electrocuting small children, although it closes their eyes, also opens their bladders alarmingly.
Every child that is sent to the Conformation Area for re-education has the approval of both parents, so the legal aspect is covered. No Mormon Dad or Mom wants children that peek during grace or family prayers. The open-eyed child steals more food than can be consumed by the standard Mormon family of Ten children that keep shut-eyed through blessings, prayers, and graces, even when all twelve at the table are famished.
Not ‘bowing-the-head’ in the prescribed attitude after the manner prescribed in 1 Kings 18:7, that all Mormons know by heart, is a venal sin, for which the old punishment used to be whipping after the manner of Southern Baptists. However, alhtough Mormonism io strict they don’t like to see children bleeding just because they have not been taught how to pray properly.
This bowing of the head, any Mormon will tell you, is the proper way to pray according to the Bible. That’s the trouble with Mormons, they will follow the Bible whether you want them to or not. They quote the Bible with stunning regularity until anyone that even only half believes the Bible is bound to admit they get it right most of the time. For example, this is what the Bible says about bowing the head when worshipping God.
Nehemiah 8:6 Ezra praised the LORD, the great God; And they bowed their heads and worshiped the LORD with their faces to the ground. ...
Exodus 4:31 and the people believed; and when they heard that the LORD had visited the people of Israel and that he had seen their affliction, they bowed their heads and worshiped ...
2 Chronicles 29:30 King Hezekiah and his officials sang praises with gladness and bowed their heads and worshiped.
1 Chronicles 29:20 Then David said to the whole assembly, “Bless the LORD your God.” And all the assembly blessed the LORD, the God of their fathers, and bowed their heads
Exodus 12:27 then tell them, 'It is the Passover sacrifice when Jehovah struck the Egyptians but spared our houses.’” And the people bowed their heads and worshiped. ...
2 Chronicles 29:29 When the offerings were finished, the king and all who were present with him gave worship with bent heads. ...
The Bible doesn’t say whether, when they bowed their heads, they kept their eyes open and gawped and gawked all over the place like Charismatics that can’t keep their minds on what they are doing because they are too busy trying to make up some sentence as in unknown tongues without saying shalalalalalalalalom, and similar Hebrew – which is not an unknown tongue - sounds, but you can bet your bottom dollar that these Israelites didn’t, because they didn’t want to be distracted when worshipping God with praise and prayer. Israelites knew it was a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the Living God, and didn’t want to take risks. Of course, if your faith is as weak as witches water then it won’t matter to you and you can get your jollies by carping and criticising those that take their worship and prayer more seriously than you do.
Of course, as you would expect, because of the more muscular construction of the arms, getting rebellious children to fold them during prayer worship can be more difficult. Arms that are folded can’t get into mischief. Folded arms can’t be use to reach out and pull the plaits of little Sarah, and folded arms cannot be employed to pull Tommy’s ear, or nip Jordan’s nose, and so disrupt what should be a sacred time when minds, hearts, and ears are tuned to one giving an invocation to deity to bless the gathering with the Holy Spirit and peace, love, and all those other godly attributes that make prayer time special for believers and believers-in-training.
Atheists and their close relatives, the Scorners, hold nothing sacred except their own wallets and comfort, so they will turn the sacred time of others into game time. Psychologists have proved that small minds are easily satisfied with smaller matters, and spoiling what is sacred to others is just par-for-the-course for Scorners, especially those that are hyper-hypocritical and religiose, because they are comatose to fine, respectable, religious, spiritual feelings enjoyed by the blessed that pray respectfully with all their hearts, might, mind, and strength.
Spiritual midgets and religious weaklings just like to have find and don’t really believe in God at all. They just use God as a hammer with which to beat up those that are truly spiritual and in tune with the Most Holy God. That’s their loss, but it explains why Mormons want their children to conform to true patterns of worship, and no one with a mind more expansive that a corn flake can complain that it is asking too much to show respect and reverence for Almighty God and his Christ. Of course, that don’t stop the small –minded from trying it on. But then, those that won’t fold their arms are likely to find the Devil using their hands for his own work, because it is well know that Satan finds work for idle hands that are not engaged in serving God in the beauty of Holiness.
To overcome Satan’s massive power over the arms of three-year old children, I invented a a machine called “Insistence on Un-Unfolded arms Device [IUD] that is strapped to a child’s arms, permanently, when they are thirty months old to prepare them for Primary Sunbeam, class when they are three. The device had arms that are fastened into the bones of the upper and lower arms by stainless steel screws and are telescopic so they grow with the child as the child develops and eventually enters adulthood.
Mormon children are forced to pray at Home on bended knees, at their bedside evening and morning, and during family prayers with all present. They are taught that it is an act of willing submission to Almighty God, but they are not taught what every wild-eyed, slain-in-the-spirit, Saturday night prayer-warrior howling Banshee knows, that kneeling before God is humiliating, and that those praying should stand or remain seated while another prays at the pulpit.
Those stupid Mormons – again! – insist on following the Bible even when they know they shouldn’t! Alright, we know it says something about it in the Bible, but we know that the Bible says a lot of things that we are not expected to follow unless we are religious fanatics! Look at these:
"And Jesus was withdrawn from them about a stone's cast, and kneeled down, and prayed" (Luke 22:41).
"Peter put them all forth, and kneeled down, and prayed; and turning him to the body said, Tabitha, arise. And she opened her eyes: and when she saw Peter, she sat up" (Acts 9:40).
"They stoned Stephen, calling upon God, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep" (Acts 7:59, 60).
"When he had thus spoken, he kneeled down, and prayed with them all" (Acts 20:36).
"When we had accomplished those days, we departed and went our way; and they all brought us on our way, with wives and children, till we were out of the city: and we kneeled down on the shore, and prayed" (Acts 21:5).
All that kneeling might be okay in those long gone days, but the world changes and God doesn’t want worshippers to kneel before him to present their petitions. He’d just as soon those praying stand up in case their arthritis troubles them. God doesn’t want to embarrassment of hundreds and thousands of knobbly-kneed, hobbling arthritics that get down, pray, and then can’t get up again! As has been said from the bench: “If it doesn’t make sense then it’s not true.” [Judge Judith Sheindlin].
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
"Oft have I travelled in the realms of God" - thus spake the poet after visiting Yorkshire and sampling the Golden Fruit of the Most Blessed County, the Yorkshire Pudding. Those trepid travellers that have not tasted Yorkshire Ambrosia should remedy thaty deficiency as soon as possible, if not sooner.
There is no excuse why anyone should be so deptived when the remedy is readily avaiable. Just ask your closest Yorkshire Person to whip us some Yorkshires, and enjoy life to the full.
Recipe available on request.
Recipe available on request.
Ey up, sithee!
The Yorkshire Traveller
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
The Time Has Come The Old Man Said To Think of Many Things, Of Rubber Spouts and Donkey Stones and Dolly Blue and Possers - By Ronnie ‘The Yorkshire Traveller’ Bray
The Time Has Come
The Old Man Said To Think of Many Things,
Of Rubber Spouts and Donkey Stones and Dolly Blue and Possers
By Ronnie ‘The Yorkshire Traveller’ Bray
The Old Man Said To Think of Many Things,
Of Rubber Spouts and Donkey Stones and Dolly Blue and Possers
By Ronnie ‘The Yorkshire Traveller’ Bray
Although we didn’t have a rubber spout on our teapot, many people did. They were available at Woolworth’s and ironmongers and were cheaper that buying a whole new teapot after the spout was broken off the family’s brewer. Never having had to have a replacement spout, I have no first hand facts of how spouts came to be broken off teapots in the first place, but I will hazard guesses that include their use as ersatz projectiles when things went awry in the domestic circle, being dropped by clumsy hands due either to old age and tremors or arthritis on the part of the handler, or too much Bentley and Shaw’s Town Ales on the part of a late night reveller who believed that the night-cap he needed was a brew of Co-op Tea. There could be other equally satisfactory explanations, but I will leave them to your recollection.
The spouts I recall were red rubber of the same hue as the orangey-red gas piping that ran from a gas spigot against a wall to a cast iron gas ring balanced precariously on a place that was not designed to hold one, or else to the majestic rear end of a coal gas heated substantial piece of Victorian engineering that constituted the period’s last word in smoothing irons. How it was that Victorian inventiveness did not contrive to formulate and build a gas-operated vacuum cleaner remains a mystery. It would not have been to difficult to arrange a small steam engine or turbine inside a suitably robust and fireproof steel body that heated a cylinder of water heated by the coal gas generated at the gasworks at the bottom of Fitzwilliam Street. Perhaps the Victorian imagination has been overstated.
We did have a teapot, and it was a large one, such that befits a lodging house and one that could travel all the way around the dining table when eight jolly lodgers were seated on their wooden chairs and supping industrial strength Pekoe Tips from pint pots that were the standard vessels of my childhood. However, it kept its spout from the time it was fired in one of Longton’s kilns to the day it was retired in the mid-fifties of the nineteen hundreds. A suitable large kettle was kept singing on the hob to refresh the pot when nearly all the tea was gone and the tea leaves awaited their resurrection by more hot water. As to the final resting place of these mammoth vessels, I stand helpless and unable to answer.
Perhaps there is a place where odd socks, odd gloves, lost cheques, letters, and mementoes go to keep company with lost friends, lost love, lost passions, lost hopes, broken dreams and teapots with broken spouts go to await better days or, dare we hope, restoration in better times. In the meantime we must content ourselves with whatever it is that qualifies as the equivalent of a replacement teapot spout, and hope that, whatever it is, it serves at least as well as the red rubber nose that made the old pots look cheerful despite their imperfections.
Then there is the almost disappeared Donkey Stone. I say almost because it should not be doubted that some of the surviving corner stores in Northern England probably still have a wooden box or two stored deep in their neglected cellars, and some day they will come to light.
Donkey Stone was a trade name given to a scouring block by Edward Read & Son of Manchester, although other companies made similar stones on machines used in Roman times called Donkey Mills. A mixture of powdered stone, cement powder, bleach powder and water. These were ground up into a stiff paste and moulded into rectangular blocks a bench, that was cut into smaller stones usually five inches long, three inches wide and about an inch thick. They resembled small bricks and were then laid out on drying shelves until they hardened off. They were light, easy to break, and could be one of several colours with white and a pale yellow being the most popular.
Scouring stones were originally used to clean the grease off stone steps in the textile mills, but clever housewives used them, for decorating their front steps and windowsills after their weekly washing. It was a matter of domestic pride for poor working people to keep the outside of their homes clean and to decorate their clean steps and sills by rubbing the scouring stones along the edges of the steps, and some would mark little triangular patterns at the angles of the stonework. In many circumstances, it was the sole means available to the poor to assert their independence and individuality. Once their individual marking patterns were established, they rarely changed from generation to generation.
Rag and bone men in their horses and carts would hand them out for a generous donation of old rags or clothes, but corner shops sold them cheaply enough.
The death knell for donkey stones was rung in during the nineteen-fifties and sixties as the textile communities followed giant mills into extinction, forcing the dissolution of neighbourhoods and friendships that had endured for more than one hundred years. New houses, maisonettes, and tower blocks to which the communities were scattered were too impersonal to perpetuate the art form of Donkey Stoning. The last scouring stone factory to close was Eli Whalley’s Lion Stone factory in Ashton-under-Lyne, that had produced them for more than ninety years.
Donkey Stone gave communities with little of intrinsic beauty built into them a noble beauty of defiance that was the only artistic impression in which most of the women could engage. Thus, its passing means more than the loss of pretty bright patterns springing out of the grimy streets of a mill town’s working class quarter, from a people used to being pushed under, denigrated, underpaid, undernourished, and under appreciated.
Unlike ancient cave paintings of ancient times, and the more durable expressions of the oppressed sprayed in subways and on the walls of abandoned buildings, the Donkey Stone artists will soon be forgotten unless we take active steps to remember them. And, if they are forgotten, their indomitable spirit that stood up against the pollution and noxious chimney fumes that poisoned their lives and rotted their curtains and consigned them to early graves, will also be dimmed and, in time, forgotten.
Will you make yourself a scouring stone, revive their ancient craft, and draw your own pretty lines delicately around your stoops and window sills so that another small glory is not lost to a careless world, and so that a proud but suffering people are not forgotten quite?
No, young man, Dolly Blue is not a Country singer. Perhaps you are thinking of Dolly Parton? Dolly Blue was a small pouch of washing day product added to the soapy water to make whites appear whiter than white. Actually, an Oxydol washing detergent television jingle declared boldly:
O – X – Y – D – O – L
Makes whites whiter than white;
Makes colours sparkling bright.
White without bleaching,
That’s what we are preaching.
There’s nothing like Oxydol!
I never did discover what whiter than white looked like, and I doubt that anyone else did either. Still, a little encouragement on washing day never did anyone any harm. I don’t recall seeing bleach among the clouds of steam that took overt the scullery on Mondays, although Lanry was a common item in the kitchens of my friends. However, I do remember Dolly bags, as the Dolly Blue containers were called. The cotton bag enclosing the contents was tied around a short wooden stick with a thread and the stick was shaped, so that an enterprising father could ink a little face on the cheese head at the top of the stick to amuse young children.
When it was time to blue the wash, the whole thing was tossed into the copper or washing tub to release its magic powers and whiten the wash. The advert read: “Out of the blue comes the whitest wash!” It seemed to me to be a contradiction in terms – I had not then learned about oxymorons – but such things as these were then the stuff of life and in the hands of those that knew what they were doing and why. When the stick was recovered, the face had vanished. Perhaps they too will gather at the place where lost things end up.
Perhaps the saddest of all is the passing of the posser. Possers had domes, usually made of copper, often intricately moulded with several layers and a series of eyeletted holes around the place where the possing pole was inserted into the posser head. This was thrust into the laundry tub to force water and its soapy suds through the clothes to loosen the dirt. The more vigour applied to this task the cleaner the clothes became and the sudsier the water grew. The washing machine presaged the passing of the posser, but they were such attractive items that the world is a poorer place because of the passing of possers.
Washing days were probably the busiest day of the week for the housewife, especially when the housewife was really the maid-of-all-work in a lodging house, as was my mother. For Louie, Monday was a day best viewed from Tuesday when all that remained to do was the ironing, folding, and the running up and down four flights of stairs to place the laundered clothes on each of the lodger'’ beds, in addition to those that belonged to her family.
Cleaning out the fire grate was a less burdensome task because it could be done without moving, provided that arthritis had not claimed your knees. Laundry, on the other hand, required pulling out the laundry vats, filling them with piggins of hot water carried from the Creda electric geyser, a job that required fifteen or more trips from the sink to the vat rack, and this was followed by grating bars of household fairy soap into the water, sorting and adding the clothes, possing them vigorously until they were ‘done’ rinsing them in clean hot water to which the Dolly Blue was added, then the vat rack was trundled to the magnificent cast iron and wooden mangle to be grumbled through huge wooden rollers to extract as much water as possible. I was sometimes assigned to turn the big red handwheel. It was fun but eventually fatiguing, after which it stopped being fun.
There is a strangeness comes into a life when familiar things become less familiar and disappear, one by one, in a silence that makes their going hardly noticeable. Someone said that the only constant was change. I don’t know whether that is true in every case, but I do know that it is true in many. But whatever the arithmetic of change might be, it is certain that the richness of past years that was there in the bits and pieces that made up the merry jigsaw puzzles of our lives, leaves us poorer in some sense with their passing, and yet something of their cheerful comfortable natures is recoverable when we set our minds to remembering them, even for no better reason than recalling past familiars lends to our fading years something of our young life with its vigour, its sense of adventure, and rekindles, briefly, our then unbroken dreams, our then not quite dashed hopes, and whatever warmth and affection we enjoyed amidst such foolish things as rubber spouts, scouring stones, dolly bags, and possers.
Now I remember. It was Heraclitus that said, “The only constant is change.” This wise man also said, “You cannot step twice into the same river; for other waters are continually flowing in.” If he meant that what is there when we look at it this second, is of a different order in the next second because time changes everything, then perhaps he provided the key about what is suddenly dear to us in age that we hardly cared for in our infancy and youth.
I would only disagree with him in the matter of the love that we have for each other, for true love’s only change is to love deeper than before, to care more fondly, and to protect more urgently and vitally. Love that does not change, or that diminishes for vacuous reasons, out of mistrust, imaginary offences, or that can be laid aside as if it never was, is not and never was true. Such malleable affection has more in common with red rubber teapot spouts than with a loving heart, and though it brings pain to the deprived, it was ever doomed to fail at some point in time.
Rubber spouts perish, Donkey Stones wear down to nothing, Dolly Bags dissolve and mice chew away their sticks, and possers – even the most beautifully crafted of them, get trodden on, misshapen, and are eventually cast aside. Only True Love remains imperishable, unalloyed, firm, its currency never failing but growing constantly to enlarge the soul. When all the world’s best and least treasures are no more, only True Love remains, eternal and indestructible, and nothing can betray it.
Copyright © 2011 – Ronnie Bray
All Rights Reserved
The spouts I recall were red rubber of the same hue as the orangey-red gas piping that ran from a gas spigot against a wall to a cast iron gas ring balanced precariously on a place that was not designed to hold one, or else to the majestic rear end of a coal gas heated substantial piece of Victorian engineering that constituted the period’s last word in smoothing irons. How it was that Victorian inventiveness did not contrive to formulate and build a gas-operated vacuum cleaner remains a mystery. It would not have been to difficult to arrange a small steam engine or turbine inside a suitably robust and fireproof steel body that heated a cylinder of water heated by the coal gas generated at the gasworks at the bottom of Fitzwilliam Street. Perhaps the Victorian imagination has been overstated.
We did have a teapot, and it was a large one, such that befits a lodging house and one that could travel all the way around the dining table when eight jolly lodgers were seated on their wooden chairs and supping industrial strength Pekoe Tips from pint pots that were the standard vessels of my childhood. However, it kept its spout from the time it was fired in one of Longton’s kilns to the day it was retired in the mid-fifties of the nineteen hundreds. A suitable large kettle was kept singing on the hob to refresh the pot when nearly all the tea was gone and the tea leaves awaited their resurrection by more hot water. As to the final resting place of these mammoth vessels, I stand helpless and unable to answer.
Perhaps there is a place where odd socks, odd gloves, lost cheques, letters, and mementoes go to keep company with lost friends, lost love, lost passions, lost hopes, broken dreams and teapots with broken spouts go to await better days or, dare we hope, restoration in better times. In the meantime we must content ourselves with whatever it is that qualifies as the equivalent of a replacement teapot spout, and hope that, whatever it is, it serves at least as well as the red rubber nose that made the old pots look cheerful despite their imperfections.
Then there is the almost disappeared Donkey Stone. I say almost because it should not be doubted that some of the surviving corner stores in Northern England probably still have a wooden box or two stored deep in their neglected cellars, and some day they will come to light.
Donkey Stone was a trade name given to a scouring block by Edward Read & Son of Manchester, although other companies made similar stones on machines used in Roman times called Donkey Mills. A mixture of powdered stone, cement powder, bleach powder and water. These were ground up into a stiff paste and moulded into rectangular blocks a bench, that was cut into smaller stones usually five inches long, three inches wide and about an inch thick. They resembled small bricks and were then laid out on drying shelves until they hardened off. They were light, easy to break, and could be one of several colours with white and a pale yellow being the most popular.
Scouring stones were originally used to clean the grease off stone steps in the textile mills, but clever housewives used them, for decorating their front steps and windowsills after their weekly washing. It was a matter of domestic pride for poor working people to keep the outside of their homes clean and to decorate their clean steps and sills by rubbing the scouring stones along the edges of the steps, and some would mark little triangular patterns at the angles of the stonework. In many circumstances, it was the sole means available to the poor to assert their independence and individuality. Once their individual marking patterns were established, they rarely changed from generation to generation.
Rag and bone men in their horses and carts would hand them out for a generous donation of old rags or clothes, but corner shops sold them cheaply enough.
The death knell for donkey stones was rung in during the nineteen-fifties and sixties as the textile communities followed giant mills into extinction, forcing the dissolution of neighbourhoods and friendships that had endured for more than one hundred years. New houses, maisonettes, and tower blocks to which the communities were scattered were too impersonal to perpetuate the art form of Donkey Stoning. The last scouring stone factory to close was Eli Whalley’s Lion Stone factory in Ashton-under-Lyne, that had produced them for more than ninety years.
Donkey Stone gave communities with little of intrinsic beauty built into them a noble beauty of defiance that was the only artistic impression in which most of the women could engage. Thus, its passing means more than the loss of pretty bright patterns springing out of the grimy streets of a mill town’s working class quarter, from a people used to being pushed under, denigrated, underpaid, undernourished, and under appreciated.
Unlike ancient cave paintings of ancient times, and the more durable expressions of the oppressed sprayed in subways and on the walls of abandoned buildings, the Donkey Stone artists will soon be forgotten unless we take active steps to remember them. And, if they are forgotten, their indomitable spirit that stood up against the pollution and noxious chimney fumes that poisoned their lives and rotted their curtains and consigned them to early graves, will also be dimmed and, in time, forgotten.
Will you make yourself a scouring stone, revive their ancient craft, and draw your own pretty lines delicately around your stoops and window sills so that another small glory is not lost to a careless world, and so that a proud but suffering people are not forgotten quite?
No, young man, Dolly Blue is not a Country singer. Perhaps you are thinking of Dolly Parton? Dolly Blue was a small pouch of washing day product added to the soapy water to make whites appear whiter than white. Actually, an Oxydol washing detergent television jingle declared boldly:
O – X – Y – D – O – L
Makes whites whiter than white;
Makes colours sparkling bright.
White without bleaching,
That’s what we are preaching.
There’s nothing like Oxydol!
I never did discover what whiter than white looked like, and I doubt that anyone else did either. Still, a little encouragement on washing day never did anyone any harm. I don’t recall seeing bleach among the clouds of steam that took overt the scullery on Mondays, although Lanry was a common item in the kitchens of my friends. However, I do remember Dolly bags, as the Dolly Blue containers were called. The cotton bag enclosing the contents was tied around a short wooden stick with a thread and the stick was shaped, so that an enterprising father could ink a little face on the cheese head at the top of the stick to amuse young children.
When it was time to blue the wash, the whole thing was tossed into the copper or washing tub to release its magic powers and whiten the wash. The advert read: “Out of the blue comes the whitest wash!” It seemed to me to be a contradiction in terms – I had not then learned about oxymorons – but such things as these were then the stuff of life and in the hands of those that knew what they were doing and why. When the stick was recovered, the face had vanished. Perhaps they too will gather at the place where lost things end up.
Perhaps the saddest of all is the passing of the posser. Possers had domes, usually made of copper, often intricately moulded with several layers and a series of eyeletted holes around the place where the possing pole was inserted into the posser head. This was thrust into the laundry tub to force water and its soapy suds through the clothes to loosen the dirt. The more vigour applied to this task the cleaner the clothes became and the sudsier the water grew. The washing machine presaged the passing of the posser, but they were such attractive items that the world is a poorer place because of the passing of possers.
Washing days were probably the busiest day of the week for the housewife, especially when the housewife was really the maid-of-all-work in a lodging house, as was my mother. For Louie, Monday was a day best viewed from Tuesday when all that remained to do was the ironing, folding, and the running up and down four flights of stairs to place the laundered clothes on each of the lodger'’ beds, in addition to those that belonged to her family.
Cleaning out the fire grate was a less burdensome task because it could be done without moving, provided that arthritis had not claimed your knees. Laundry, on the other hand, required pulling out the laundry vats, filling them with piggins of hot water carried from the Creda electric geyser, a job that required fifteen or more trips from the sink to the vat rack, and this was followed by grating bars of household fairy soap into the water, sorting and adding the clothes, possing them vigorously until they were ‘done’ rinsing them in clean hot water to which the Dolly Blue was added, then the vat rack was trundled to the magnificent cast iron and wooden mangle to be grumbled through huge wooden rollers to extract as much water as possible. I was sometimes assigned to turn the big red handwheel. It was fun but eventually fatiguing, after which it stopped being fun.
There is a strangeness comes into a life when familiar things become less familiar and disappear, one by one, in a silence that makes their going hardly noticeable. Someone said that the only constant was change. I don’t know whether that is true in every case, but I do know that it is true in many. But whatever the arithmetic of change might be, it is certain that the richness of past years that was there in the bits and pieces that made up the merry jigsaw puzzles of our lives, leaves us poorer in some sense with their passing, and yet something of their cheerful comfortable natures is recoverable when we set our minds to remembering them, even for no better reason than recalling past familiars lends to our fading years something of our young life with its vigour, its sense of adventure, and rekindles, briefly, our then unbroken dreams, our then not quite dashed hopes, and whatever warmth and affection we enjoyed amidst such foolish things as rubber spouts, scouring stones, dolly bags, and possers.
Now I remember. It was Heraclitus that said, “The only constant is change.” This wise man also said, “You cannot step twice into the same river; for other waters are continually flowing in.” If he meant that what is there when we look at it this second, is of a different order in the next second because time changes everything, then perhaps he provided the key about what is suddenly dear to us in age that we hardly cared for in our infancy and youth.
I would only disagree with him in the matter of the love that we have for each other, for true love’s only change is to love deeper than before, to care more fondly, and to protect more urgently and vitally. Love that does not change, or that diminishes for vacuous reasons, out of mistrust, imaginary offences, or that can be laid aside as if it never was, is not and never was true. Such malleable affection has more in common with red rubber teapot spouts than with a loving heart, and though it brings pain to the deprived, it was ever doomed to fail at some point in time.
Rubber spouts perish, Donkey Stones wear down to nothing, Dolly Bags dissolve and mice chew away their sticks, and possers – even the most beautifully crafted of them, get trodden on, misshapen, and are eventually cast aside. Only True Love remains imperishable, unalloyed, firm, its currency never failing but growing constantly to enlarge the soul. When all the world’s best and least treasures are no more, only True Love remains, eternal and indestructible, and nothing can betray it.
Copyright © 2011 – Ronnie Bray
All Rights Reserved
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