Things I No Longer Worry About

• Did I leave the iron on?
• Did I take the meat out of the freezer so it's thawed when I get home? (There's no dinner for the family if I forgot.)
• Did I miss that important phone call?
• Will the dimestore have my size of typewriter ribbon? Or must I go downtown on Saturday to the office supply store?
• Did the bookstore already phone me saying they had my special-order book? (Why must all the books I want be "special-order"?)
• Will my airplane ticket arrive in the mail in time for my trip?
• Running up long-distance phone charges; so I'd call after 7:00 p.m.
• Will I have enough cash at the checkout?
• Did I shake every bit of sand out of the driver's side floor mat so my father won't know I went to the beach?
• Am I wearing two different color nylon stockings?
• Can I run to the grocery store in time for them to cash this check?
• Is my slip or my bra strap showing?
• Do I have a dime with me at all times in case I must make a phone call?
• Oh no, I have no quarter for the collection plate! All I have is my last dollar bill!

I'll never forget the time I went on a movie date and for some reason my mother was convinced we had gone to see a terribly forbidden movie, The Happy Hooker. Planning to catch me there, she dragged my father that evening to that movie, the first they'd probably seen in a theater in 20 years, and probably the last in their lifetimes. The joke was on them. I think Ray and I saw that evening The Towering Inferno.

Those Who Ironed Before Me

In 2008 I emailed Mom about the old wooden family ironing board I still use and printed out her answer, taping it to the underside: “bought for $2.00 in 1955 in a State Street junk store.” She and Dad were newlyweds, and it was the golden age of ironing. I first saw her cry, over a neighbor's rude remark, while she was ironing out on the porch (it was summer). I was between ages 3 and 5 and horrified. That’s my first memory of this ironing board.

In the '70s the heavy awkward thing became mine and I hauled it to the 10 or so places I lived until settling here in 2001, by then ironing at most four times a year. A week ago I saw the board’s butt end had been soaked and its cover shredded, and thought: Buy a new ironing board? Naw. I’ll simply buy a new cover. So I did. Stripped the old cover off--it had been stapled on--and saw the full-length crack in the board’s “table,” rendering it worthless but not useless.

Googling, I learned this three-legged style was first manufactured around 1914 and that metal legs replaced wooden ones in the 1940s, giving me the board's approximate age. I turned the board over looking for a manufacturer’s label or stamp. Nothing. But besides the note I’d taped to the underside was writing I’d never noticed before. Handwriting. Only some of greenish lettering was readable.

This much was clear:

 ________ d A. Dixon

______________________ Wis.

Probably the previous owner who’d junked the thing! With light and magnification I finally confirmed the name as “Fred A. Dixon.” No, not “Freda.” That “A.” is clearly an initial. Plus I cannot imagine any female so attached to her ironing board she’d write her name and hometown on it. What, is she taking the ironing board to camp, or worried it'll be confused with someone else's?

Where the ink had worn away, faint impressions in the wood allowed me to confirm the first letter of the town as “W,” resembling the fancy “W” in “Wis.” (My hometown with the junk shop begins with “R.”) Fragments of other letters were just visible. Might it be two words?

The town name’s final letter, I thought, looked like “h.” “Beach”? There is no Wisconsin town called anything “Beach.” Or did it say “Fish”? That was more likely. The top of a capital “t” was followed by the top of a capital “e.” The answer was probably “Whitefish”. . .

But there’s no Whitefish, Wisconsin. Whitefish Bay is in the next county to the north, but believe me, no native calls it Whitefish because then we can’t make the standard joke about that wealthy suburb, calling it “Whitefolks Bay.” There’s a Whitewater, Wis. But the final letter before the “Wis.” was not an “r.” The storm outside had knocked out my Internet, so I pursued this puzzle, thinking that “h” might be a “d.”

Then I saw it: Waterford!

Waterford is a village in the same county as my hometown.

Census records from 1940 list the household of Fred A. Dixon, 57, of Waterford, Wisconsin as himself and his wife Lulu, 56; their son and daughter-in-law, ages 31 and 29; and three children under age 4. They used the ironing board a lot. So did Mom, who sprinkled water on clothes and rolled them in towels before pressing them, and also darned socks over a light bulb.