Frenzy

Last night, I got into a cleaning mood—or what Iwanski calls a “cleaning frenzy.” That really is a more accurate description, since I am pretty much like the Tasmanian Devil when I get in one of those moods.

And it usually hits me out of nowhere. On a Friday night, I’m just sitting around watching t.v., when suddenly I think, “This place is a mess!”

I hop up and immediately start to pick up things and race to put them away, like the President is coming over in only ten minutes, and I have to make the place look spotless for him.

It reminds me of when I was a kid, and my parents told my sister Sheri and me to clean up our toy room in the basement. We hated cleaning (what kid likes to clean??), so we would make it a game, a race to see how quickly we could get it all picked up. We would say “On your mark, get set, go!” and then we would immediately begin singing the “circus tune” and start running around, picking up toys and stuffing them as fast as we could into the toy box.

You know the song I’m talking about, right? It’s the one they play at the circus, the one that goes “da da dadada da da daa da da da…” Okay, I just found out that it’s called “Entrance of the Gladiators”—who knew? And here it is, since you probably still have no idea what song I’m talking about.



So anyway, that’s how I learned to clean, and that’s pretty much how I still do it, to this day. I put on some “peppy” music (Iwanski hates it when I call music “peppy,” so I like to call it that) and start running around the room like a mad woman.

The problem with this method of cleaning is that I tend to randomly place objects in odd places, like putting a cereal box on the bottom shelf of the end table, or putting a bottle of mosquito repellant on the bookshelf. I guess it kind-of defeats the purpose of cleaning, but the place still looks cleaner, somehow.

The bad part is after I’m done cleaning, and we can’t find something. Correction: the bad part is after I’m done cleaning, and Iwanski can’t find something. Then he gets irritated, and I get irritated right back at him because you know, it’s never my fault.

So last night, when I started going on a cleaning frenzy, Iwanski shouted from the other room,

“Hey, what are you doing?”

“I’m cleaning,” I yelled, stuffing a page of his writing between a couple of books on the bookshelf.

“Well, don’t just start putting stuff in weird places. Keep your wits about you!” he yelled back.

I started laughing...and then I quickly pulled the page of his writing from between the two books and placed it carefully on a shelf on the computer desk...right next to the salt shaker, dental floss, and 1970 Rocky Colavito baseball card.