Do You Know Reddy Kilowatt?

One Girl Scout field trip was to the electric utility company's Home Ec demonstration kitchen with electric stoves, which we had never seen, and we practiced cooking on them, back when they WANTED people to use up electrical energy.

The electric company 's mascot was a figure made of lighting bolts with a bulbous head, a light-bulb nose and electric-socket ears, named Reddy Kilowatt, and it gave out Reddy-themed potholders and lapel pins, and electric bills had his picture on them, but after the energy shortage of 1973-74 -- the winter that, to save energy, we walked to school in the mornings with the stars still overhead -- saw him rarely, and now Reddy Kilowatt items are collectible. My sister and bro-in-law in Wisconsin collected two nostalgic Reddy potholders for me. Flummoxed because they had no tabs to hang them, I left them in a drawer for years before realizing they contained magnets for sticking them on the fridge. I now use them frequently. Here they are assisting me, saying "Be modern, cook electrically," on the propane stove with a pan of lavender shortbread.

Although Reddy looks to me now as if he suffers from terrible arthritis, I am fond of him. He was designed in the 1920s, to be consumer-friendly when farmers hemmed and hawed about buying electricity because they'd gotten along for 10,000 years without it. As I moved around the country I met people who had never heard of Reddy Kilowatt, and at times felt very alone, the way you feel when no one around you shares your archaic memories.

Then one day I had at the Divine Cabin a guest, born in Missouri in 1947. He saw my potholders and said, "Oh, Reddy Kilowatt," and I almost threw myself at his feet and begged him to marry me.

Problem We Do Not Have

Used to live exactly one block from here, for four years, and before that two blocks from here, for six years, for a total of ten, among many poor folks trying to make a dollar. The rapper Nelly grew up on my street while I lived there. Look, rent was $255 a month and my income was $500 a month and stayed that way for two years, and my landlord (owned both buildings) never ever raised my rent from the starting rent because he wanted to keep a tenant whose checks did not bounce.

I laugh sometimes at life in those close-set apartment buildings. Cats sang in chorus in the back alley and woke us all, and tenants on the second and third floors raised their windows, screamed swearwords, and pelted the cats with shoes. Summer barbecues smoked on every fire escape and the party hosts gave away their ages by the music they were blasting. Once a crew removed my fire escape (I guess to replace it) while I was at work and it was the only way to enter my apartment because I had police-locked and chained the other door. The workers still there put a ladder up to the second story and told me to climb it. I was wearing a skirt but also pettipants, and blessed myself for wearing pettipants and being fit. I was in my late 30s then.

I got very good at -- right in this spot in this photo -- darting at top speed through an alley in order to cut five minutes from my walk home. Then I moved to the Divine Property. These days the old neighborhood has been upscaled and landscaped and at night the alley is floodlit. They've even put benches along that walkway to make it seem parklike, and plants in planters to make it pretty. But apparently people want plants badly enough to steal them. I now live where there are plants galore and we worry they'll be eaten by deer.

What Is It About Old Stuff?

I rearranged my bedroom to look as much as possible like a hotel room for no reason except that I adore hotel rooms, private, clean and comfy, pillows and towels plumped and straightened beautifully and magically every day while I'm out doing something fun, and I'm ecstatic and smitten out of my gourd if it's a firm mattress with--oh, rapture!!--white or cream-colored shadow-striped bedsheets.

So I bought the sheets, and a hotel-looking bedspread and pillow covers, and then rearranged the room, dragging to the garage a battered old metal foot locker given me when I started college, which nice ladies filled with "hope chest" doilies and linens -- boy, did they get a wrong number! -- I was 17 years old and the Vietnam War had ended the previous year so maybe foot lockers were on sale. It had not been moved in 16 years and was locked. Total genius me, I knew exactly where its key was: in the junk drawer, on a key ring that's a souvenir of San Francisco where I've never been: the carefully preserved "key ring holding keys I never use."

Inside the trunk lay Christmas things like stockings and "crafty" tree ornaments that had lost all their crocheted and decoupaged charm, and two green-and-maize rough woolen woven placemats, except they were too small for placemats, as ugly as they sound: a souvenir from Ireland from a certain mother-in-law, God rest her soul; all this I threw out. At the very bottom in a plastic casing was my old Girl Scout sash I thought I'd lost years ago.

You had to "graduate" from Brownie to Junior Girl Scout to get a sash to sew badges on, if we earned them. Nerdy girls earned badges enough to fill the front of the sash and start up the back--Girl Scout cool. The next step up, Cadette Girl Scouts, earned badges with yellow borders instead of green. Earning each badge required genuine mastery: 10 or 12 steps increasing in difficulty, and each step had to be shown to or performed in front of an adult, the Scout leader, who'd sign off on it. I remember most the intensity of earning the Needlework badge. Several wars later, I can still cross-stitch, huck-a-back-stitch, satin-stitch, applique, whipstitch, hem by hand, tie French knots, darn small holes, and what-all. It's the leftmost badge in the third row, above the first-aid box.

(I don't remember any first aid, though. When I'm accidentally cut or stung the first thing I do is swear.)

I left Girl Scouting halfway through Cadettes because the badges had increasingly discouraging requirements: The "Aviation" badge asked us to correctly fold and pack a parachute. I earned the "easy" ones like dressmaking and storytelling and dropped out.

Today with one click I ordered airline tickets like it's nothing and from Amazon.com a programmable coffeepot for my mock hotel room, so I will wake up to coffee or hot water for tea without moving from the bed, and the coffeepot arrives the next day.