My Affair with Mr. Clean

By Sharie Derrickson

My husband and daughter are addicted to gadgets and cleaning products – in that they have this strange urge to just go out and buy them. It is some weird bonding ritual of which I am not included. If there is a newer or greater product that cleans, sweeps, dusts, or organizes, the two of them rush out and try and find it. Most of the time, they come home with some new cleaning or organizing gadget that is used once and then never touched again because it is lame.

On top of it all, they try and con me by telling me from the cel phone that, “they bought me something.” Not only did, “they buy me something,” but also they bought me something that I am really, really, really, really and going to just love. I then sit home all eager to find out what they bought me only to find out that they bought me a salad shooter. I hate salad. Frankly, I don’t see what people see in salads, let alone in something that shoots a salad. I don’t believe in making salads. I believe, that if you absolutely have to eat a salad, then you should buy one that comes in a bag. I have no desire to mess up my kitchen all in the name of health. Salads are a scam designed by kitchen gadget people who try to convince you that salads are good for you so you will buy their product.

So, they show me the salad shooter and I am supposed to get all weak-kneed over it like it is a diamond tiara or something. For crying out loud – it’s a machine that you put a cucumber in and it shoots it into a bowl – how exciting is that? Then, they expect me to cancel my plans for the day so that I can go out, buy some cucumbers, and then shoot them into a bowl. “No, sorry girls, I can’t go to lunch with you because my family and I are going to make a salad – from scratch – with my new salad shooter.”

Then, I have to tell them a tragic story. “You know, I once had a math teacher in high school who lost an eye using one of these. They’re treacherous machines – like lawn darts.”

“That’s a lie mom – you said it was a bow-hunting accident.”

“No, he went bow hunting and then went home to make a salad to have with his freshly-killed game, and the next thing you know, he shoots cucumber in his eye. I never liked math or salads after that,” I said with a shiver. “I had nightmares about it for a month.”

And the salad shooter is just one of the many things they drag home that I am suppose to get all goodie goodie about. I have this spin thing you put plastic ware into. “Oooooo. Look at this,” my husband says. “It spins.”

“It’s plastic ware. Why does it need to spin?”

“Because you just turn this carousel around in circles and you can grab the different size plastic ware.”

“It’s plastic ware – I still don’t see why it needs to spin.”

“It saves space.”

“Space for what? The recharger for the steak knives? The solar-powered juicer?”

“Come here and look – see – it spins. It spins this way – it spins that way – you can pull it out and it spins – and it even spins if you put it in a drawer.”

“But I still don’t see why it needs to spin? Make it stop spinning, and I will try and like it. Until then, I don’t want it in my kitchen. It’s too weird.”

The same thing went for the wet-dry floor mopper with the heat and massage grip handle, the battery-powered bug sucker and cobweb remover, the magnetic light bulb cleaner. In short, I have had little use for any of the products they have brought home because I believed that nothing is ever what it is cracked up to be – that is, until last weekend when my family brought home the most marvelous invention of all time – the “Mr. Clean Magic Eraser.”

Now, I know it is a little out of my journalism realm to do product endorsements. That would be a set a bad precedent because before you know it, everyone would want me to do a product endorsement, and I am just too busy for all of that. I have columns to write, a family to take care of, government meetings to attend, and reality television to keep up with, but, mostly, I am busy using my new Magic Eraser. I can’t get enough of this thing. It’s addicting. I’m telling you, I really don’t think putting people in space is all that big of a deal compared to my new sponge. So what if we can build a big space ship out of aluminum foil and then shoot it into the cosmos so that someday, when I am dead and gone, we can colonize Mars and plunder it for its natural resources. Is that going to get the grime off of my kitchen cupboards? No. I don’t think so. But, for once, science has come up with something that makes my life easier.

I know – science is, all in all, a good thing and has brought us some pretty neat stuff like Tang, memory foam, and long-lasting lipstick, but really, outside of those, not much else has made my life any easier or more pleasant. Science has also given us some pretty stupid stuff like cellophane and sneakers that light up. But, oo-la-la, this new sponge can’t be beat.

At first, I was a skeptic when my husband and daughter came home so excited. “We bought you something and we think you are really going to love it.”

“Does it spin?”

“No.”

“Okay then. Let’s see it.” They then pulled out the sponge.

“Great. You bought me a sponge because nothing says ‘I love you’ more than a sponge.”

“Come on mom, just give it a try.”

I said to myself, ‘Watch this – I’ll pick the most grimy thing,” which, of course, is that seal that goes around your refrigerator that somehow, and I have never quite figured it out even after setting up a time-lapse camera, gets so yucky that you need a tetanus shot every time you open the fridge.

I opened the box, put a little hot water on the sponge, and what do you know but that sponge actually took off years of gross. “Okay, so it works on fridge seals, but, will it remove the dingy stuff around the doorknobs? I think not,” I said, like the know-it-all I am. In seconds, the gunk was gone. I scowled. “Alright then. So it works on that, but, and here is the real test – what about all that dirt stuff on the kitchen cupboards?”

I never understand how the doors of kitchen cupboards get dirty. You wash a dish, you dry the dish, then you put it away, and in the process, your cupboard doors end up covered in sticky dirt. Where does the sticky dirt come from? Is my family getting up in the middle of the night and rubbing sticky dirt on the cupboards just to make me crazy so they can have me locked up?

Remember that Betty Davis movie where the family tried to drive the mother mad by making her think she was hearing things, and then they got her committed to a mental institution, when all along it was just part of an evil plan to get to her money? Is it like that only, instead of my money, my family wants the television remote?

Well, any way, this sponge sent me on a cleaning frenzy. All my conversations somehow end up touting the greatness of this sponge. I dream about it. I can’t wait to make a mess just so I can use it. I am actually glad that my family is getting up in the middle of the night to put sticky dirt on my cupboards to drive me insane to that they can declare me incompetent and have me locked up – think of all the places I could use the sponge in an insane asylum.

And, the very best thing about the sponge is that it cleans up blood. I told them that the salad shooter was dangerous, but would they listen to me? Noooooo. Then came the nightmares. For the past few nights, Mr. Clean has been chasing me with a salad shooter but he’s wearing an eye patch. You know guys, maybe the nut house isn’t such a bad idea after all.

© 2006 Sharie Derrickson. Previously printed in the Thousand Islands Sun.