Rent A Helper

Orangeness 14: Servant

I want a servant. Not a slave or some poor soul in debt bondage, and not a nanny. I want someone like the person who took care of me while I was mired in the House of Mildew. She was not just a house cleaner, she was a multi-star general of home economics. She could tell you where everything was going and contact the people who would disappear it. But the best was that she took care of me while I dashed around meeting with lawyers and realtor and CPA and e-mailery on my laptop. She brought me food she made herself, nice stuff like salads and pasta, since there was no food left in the Refrigerator of Dismalness. And she did my laundry!  And made my mildewy bed!  And she bravely swept up the mouse droppings. And all this work from a lady who just celebrated her 80th birthday!

I am now totally spoiled. I am waiting for someone to do all this household work for me, now that so much of the contents of the old house are now sitting in my apartment exuding that lovely perfume into my enclosed urban atmosphere. What would I like this person to do? She and her team will clean off all the baked-on mung and greasy dust in my kitchen. She will help me move the stored materials into another room. She will vacuum my rugs when my back hurts too much to bend over and do it myself. She will make my bed with fresh sheets which smell good! She (or they) will clean the cavelike deposits from my bathrooms. And so much more. So why not make it so, as the Captain says? I have done it, contracted a professional service agency who is going to come to my apartment with a cleanliness team and make a first stab at cleaning the joint up.

But this isn’t all I want my caretaker to do. I want her to actually like me, in a tenuous and idealized version of what a nice relative might be like. Like, bake cookies or look through my books with me preparing to send them out, or just have a conversation. I grew up in a world of sarcasm. I’d like to have just a few non-sarcastic moments in my life, especially in our current twisted atmosphere. I would pay for it. Just a few hours every few days, maybe. Pathetic, you’ll say. Make your own friends. Would you believe there are companies with “Rent-a-Grandma” service? And personal assistants ready to help you? I don’t trust it, but the concept is out there. With no nagging voices about how socially inept I am. You arrange and pay. This whole thing existed with the “lady’s maid” in the nineteenth century and earlier, but it is culturally dangerous in our modern era since the maid will probably be from another country and have different customs. Right now I’ll settle for cleaning and less dust, and hopefully a smile.