Pressing the iron into service
At book club the other night, we were talking about crass television commercials, and one friend offered the example of Viagra ads during morning news shows.
“So, I was trying to get out the door, and my husband and sons were fighting over the iron, and the morning news show is on and there’s that commercial,” she said. Everybody else offered their own examples of embarrassing commercials, and the whole time I was thinking: What? You people iron?
There’s an iron in the laundry room somewhere, but I can’t tell you the last time it was hot. Maybe this is more a comment on our reliance on fleece clothing that begins its life as plastic pop bottles than an indication of any laziness on my part. But I just don’t iron anymore.
Go back 20 years, and you would have found an ironing board part of the permanent furniture in my bedroom. I must have worn a lot of linen in my 20s because I rarely got dressed without ironing my outfit first. And many a day I turned around when I was halfway to work because I wasn’t sure if I’d unplugged the iron.
But then I had a kid, stopped dressing in suits every day, folded up the ironing board, wrapped the cord around the iron one last time and that was that. I like to think our family grooming reputation hasn’t suffered. I don’t think we’re all that wrinkly – at least not our clothing.
A few years back, there was a something called Wrinkle Free, a product you could spray onto dry clothing to smooth out the wrinkles. That product stood between my children and rumpled embarrassment for years, and then the stores quit carrying it. I went on eBay and bought a case of it, 24 cans of the stuff. At a neighborhood dinner gathering, the moms started talking about ironing their kids’ clothing, and I proudly brought out my case of wrinkle spray and lovingly presented a can to each person. Nobody seemed all that impressed; obviously, they didn’t understand the treasure I’d given them.
Either that, or these women actually ironed all the time and didn’t see the point.
As it happens, I’ll be unfolding the ironing board one of these days. We’re headed to a warm spot in a few weeks, and there’s a basket of men’s summery linen shirts that need ironing. I walk past that basket at least 10 times a day and see the shirts all crumpled up there: a pale blue one, a black and white one and the red one with little yellow lobsters all over it. First, I think that shirt would be more accurate if it were yellow with red lobsters. And then I think, I wonder what it would cost to take them to the cleaners to be ironed? Don’t they have machines that do that in, like, 30 seconds?
Then again, my friend says the men in her house fight over the iron every morning. They must be pressing their own clothes. Maybe that basket of crumpled linen shirts is really man’s work after all. Isn’t there a superhero named Iron Man?
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.