It’s an obscure quote, from a John Hiatt song by the name of “Ethelyne” but those were the only lyrics I could come up with that had to do with bathrooms. Sorry. Anyway, and without further ado, I present to you my toilet paper collection.

The box. Even it has a certain, uh, camp appeal.

Israel was a very young country at the time, and poor. The kibbutz system was a show piece for American Jews. The toilet paper was the deal breaker, however. Recycled paper with chunks of who knows what. The art director at my office astutely pointed out that you’d pay big bucks today for a sheet of that stuff, and you’d be buying it in a high-end paper boutique. Maybe so, but you still wouldn’t want it anywhere near your ass. The pink stuff was barely better, and came from a very elegant hotel.

This stuff was hard, and coated on one side. COATED, people. As in, slick… non-porous.

Different train. This was also hard, and crinkly, like onion skin paper or tracing paper.

Those are just climate stains, OK? This paper was like crepe paper, with a heavy, crinkly texture. Soft-ish. Sort of.

The famous neon pink, heavy as paper towel. Deeply textured. Ribbed, even. Swiss engineering at it’s finest, eh?

I thought that you’d be able to see, in the scan, that you can read my handwriting, even where the paper is doubled. It was another example of crunchy, hard, slick tissue paper.

Pink waxed paper. Pre-cut, to add insult to possible injury.

And that is your tour of European toilet paper, circa 1966. Thank you, thank you. It was my pleasure.

Sorry about the big gap in witty entries, here, but you know? Sometimes even I can’t find life amusing.

And I have been working on something special for you all, really I have. My little scanner and I have been very busy with this project.

It started two weekends ago, when I went north to the home territories for my Auntie Em’s birthday. The RLA and I planned to go up for her party, and come straight home, not getting sucked in to working on the parental units’  home dismantling project. But then my brother came by and poked around in a cabinet in the garage that I hadn’t gotten to yet and he discovered a major lode of vintage photos of family members we had never seen. Both the family members and the photos. Neither were ever mentioned. Of course, that set off a new push in the genealogy*.

But he also found three large boxes of other stuff. My childhood stuff, to be precise. My Barbies. My lavender Ken doll case. Watch for that bad boy on E-bay. And two things which I thought had been lost forever in the mists of time and parental tossing of childhood crap, and another two things which I have no idea why they were even or ever saved.

Item 1: A twenty-foot chain of chewing gum wrappers (why?)

Item 2: A small box of Creepy Crawlers, made one vacation when the Sistergirlfriendgirl got a Creepy Crawler maker for Christmas. I had a lovely color sense even then, let me tell you. The black newt with the red tail is very nice, and so is the yellow and lime green caterpillar.

Item 3: My collection of Beatles trading cards. Almost a complete set of Series 3 (black and white). Memory does not play me false, as I have more John Lennon pictures than anyone else, so I wasn’t impressed with Sir Paul-The-Cute-One even at the age of 10. Although this discovery got me excited, a quick perusal of E-Bay reveals that this is one more Boomer toy that is more valuable in theory than in practice. Guess I’ll be keeping those.

It is Item 4 which turned my world upside down. I thought this object lost forever. I had searched for it for years. There is only one other thing I could find in the house which would make me as elated by its discovery: and that is the drawing of “My Father’s Store” that I did when maybe 7 years old and which features the shoe window (every pair different and includes a pair of bunny slippers) and a view of my father through the doors (where he is fitting a pair of shoes)**

No. What I found, and what I have been scanning in for the greater edification of my readers, is a small box that originally contained coconut patties. I didn’t and don’t much like coconut patties, but my Great Uncle Nat did, and he gave this particular box to my mother when we went to Europe in 1966. I may have mentioned that trip before?***

What the box contains now, and what it held all during that Grand Tour was my special collection of European souvenirs. What I chose to collect, and why, has been the subject of debate around the office since my discovery. My boss, and the PDB both consider this to be a major marker of my mental instability and innate peculiarities (Hello?? Mr. Pot, I’d like you to meet Mr. Kettle). OK, OK, so get to the point already, right? What was it that I collected that long ago summer when I was 11?

Toilet paper.

I had never seen anything quite like the variety and quality of European toilet paper, and I knew that none of my friends would believe me when I told them that on a Swiss train, the paper was hot pink/magenta and as thick and textured as a paper towel. Or that in a French hotel (a four-star hotel, no less) the toilet paper was pre-cut into little squares and the paper itself was thin, stiff and crinkly like tracing paper, or waxed on one side… No wonder the French are always pissed off about something.

So I collected samples, labeled them assiduously and saved them in that little coconut pattie box. They were a hit with all my friends. I haven’t seen that box in 20 years at least, and lamented its loss every time I thought about it.

I’ve been scanning them in, and will post them soon, I promise.

* The Rubes. From Yonkers. They were my maternal Grandmother’s family. Also cousins/uncles to my maternal Grandfather. Somehow. I think through his mother. Is it any wonder that certain members of my family have 6 toes?

**Shoes. Go figure.

*** Yeah, like one or two HUNDRED times.

So. I’m a blonde, although here at the second half of my life, it is more of a rodential sort of brown, liberally salted with white? grey? transparent? Whatever. Anyway. I’m a blonde, and sometimes I act like one.

Take for instance the other night when I was reviewing my credit card bill. There were two very large charges to Apple. I tried to review the purchases, but there were no details. I drew a total blank. I knew that I had bought no new hardware, no new software from Apple. And there were two charges made on consecutive days. I was stumped. It had to be credit card theft, right?

I went on-line to my credit card company and challenged the charges. Done and done. When the RLA came back from walking the dogs, I told him about the mysterious charges and he looked at me like I had grown a third head.

What do you mean, you don’t recognize the charges? DUH. It’s the calendars and books you made for everyone’s holiday gifts. Almost $800 worth of calendars and books.

Yesterday morning, bright and early, I called the credit card company. They had already credited my account the full amount and had closed the file. (Let’s give credit—HAH—where credit is due: American Express.) As far as they were concerned, the matter was over. I said it was fraudulent, they believed me. Done and done. If I needed to pay Apple, Apple would have to re-bill me; I need to call them.

So I did. And I apologized for being a ditz. And I told them that I needed to pay them, but AmEx couldn’t reinstate the charge, and what do we do now?

Apple support escalated me through a few levels of customer service, and then got my e-mail, so they could send me instructions for payment. But they didn’t. What they sent me was a thank you note for being a loyal customer. And told me to keep my order, free of charge.

There’s an old adage in marketing that an unhappy customer will tell seven people about a bad experience, but a happy customer will only tell one, maybe two.

I’m over the moon happy, and I want as many people as I can tell to hear the story of what customer service is supposed to be. Both from American Express (you said you didn’t make that charge and that’s enough for us, here’s your money back) and Apple. I don’t even know WHY Apple made that decision. Maybe it was because of MacWorld. Maybe they looked up my account saw that I’ve been a loyal customer since 1988. Maybe it was just karma. Maybe I was the one millionth customer. Maybe it is just that Apple is the best company in the world.

What ever. I know that today, I’m proud to be a stockholder and a former employee. Steve Jobs, you are my idol.

When I quoted Yoko, I promised that there would be more to come, more things I’ve read that have influenced me, and here it one of the most important. I first read the passage below in a Survey of English Literature, Renaissance to the Present, in 1973. My professor was Ronald Newman (It’s been 35 years, and I still remember his name). He was wonderful, in and of himself, but he made even the dullest of the dead white men fascinating.

But this? This changed my life. Every few years, I go back and read it again, just to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything, to make sure I am still living in the now.

It was one hundred years old when I read it, and in its day was condemned for corrupting a generation of British youth (including and especially Oscar Wilde).

RJ, the RLA and I (MJ bailed ‘cause he didn’t think the RLA was coming) went down to the u-pic fields this morning. It’s getting harder and harder to find them, even in the most South Western nooks and crannies of Dade County. Instead of spreading green fields of tomatoes, strawberries and corn, or groves of mangoes, limes and avocados, there are town houses and estate homes. The RLA and I call them mushroom houses, because it seems like after every hard rain, a circle of them sprout up.

They have names like Mediterraneo and Vizcaya, but people, half a million price tag or no, they are still on Krome Avenue, west of which is only the tail end of the Everglades, and they are still in the middle of the great unwashed. I didn’t see a Neiman’s or even a Macy’s in those enormous strip malls today, but there was one each of BJ’s Wholesale Club, Super Wal-Mart, Max’s Something or Other denoting enormous quantities, and Costco. There were Targets and Home Depots and every other variety of big-box supercenters, and maybe two or three u-pics tucked in like stubborn stains of green on the other-wise beige knees of commerce. Or something like that.

RJ’s birthday cake, it all it’s sparkly glory. And yes, it was hot pink on the inside, too. Not quite the perfect maraschino cherry cake, yet, but getting really, really close.