Charity

Each month my buddy Kelly volunteers to clean the six bathrooms at the church she attends.  They need clean bathrooms weekly and don't always have volunteers, and Kelly feels like giving back and thus she opts for a once a month chore.  Once she took my daughter who helped clean the bathrooms, but not out of the charitable goodness of her heart.

Yesterday was my turn.  I met Kelly at her workplace where she transferred a bucket of cleaning supplies, a broom, a mop, and four bags of food for the church food bank into my van.  She then got into the passenger front seat and proceeded to tell me how to drive ask questions concerning my driving.

"What are you doing?"
"Why are you doing that?"
"Why wouldn't you go out this way?"
"Where are you going?"
"Shouldn't you be over here?"

Despite my having lived in this county longer, I am obviously not familiar with the ways of driving to and from her church, which is almost directly across the street from my dermatologist's office.  Lucky for me I'm use to having a critic in the passenger seat, and I took with my usual grace and patience.

"Alright, CONNIE, I got it!"
"Thank you for pointing me toward this road that I drive every three months to my doctor's office."
"Is this where you want me to be, huh, CONNIE?"

We got to the church, unloaded and entered through the preschool door.  I felt quite righteous standing before the door waiting for admittance to volunteer to help the church, but when the preschool woman opened the door and looked at us standing in our ratty shirts clutching cleaning supplies, she held the door open and dismissed us with a look reserved for the janitorial staff.  A humbling experience.

The church was dark and Kelly led me into an area that I had been in once before when Kelly was baptized.  We started in the women's bathroom which was off to the side of the room.  It was a large room with two stalls, a sink and a big mirror that stretched across the entire wall.  While I was surveying the scene, Kelly immediately took out some supplies and began tackling the toilet stalls.  She was like a whirlwind of cleaning frenzy.  She cleaned the inside and outside of the toilets, she scrubbed the tiled walls around the toilet, and she washed down the stall walls and doors.  She was, quite frankly, unrecognizable.

I have known Kelly since the 2nd grade.  I have been in her bedroom as a child.  A room that probably should have been condemned with all of the moldy dishes hiding under her bed.  I have cleaned her Florida apartment where I found enough cat hair to donate that would have kept ten cats with cancer quite warm.  I have visited her beach house where I can honestly state that cleaning is not high on her lists of household chores.  So to see her attack a bathroom as Mr. Clean himself would no one can fault me for thinking, however briefly, that perhaps upon entry of the church a spirit had taken over her body.

While Kelly was cleaning I was still surveying the room.  I looked at myself in the large mirror and rearranged my hair and clothing.  I noticed that the sink had a chunk of porcelain missing, but that the sink and mirror and floor certainly did not appear dirty at all.  I turned around and hanging on the wall was a wooden shelf with two cubby holes and hooks for hanging coats.  Inside the cubby holes was a waded up piece of purple fabric that was frayed at the edges and a dark blue cotton capri pant size medium.  Above the shelf was a small lantern with a small rubber chicken sitting where the light should have been and two large yellow dead, rubber chickens with their legs tied together with string.  Not your normal everyday bathroom findings.  Of course I had to comment.

Me:  "What's up with the dead, rubber chickens?"
Kelly:  "I'm going to count how many times you say the same thing Darcy said when she came in to help me clean."

I took that to mean that I was falling down on the job and so I took the chickens down, folded the purple fabric and capri pants, washed the shelf, and hung the chickens by their legs on the hooks reserved for coats.  Then I moved on to the sink and the mirror and the fake plant in the corner.  Done with that I turned around for instruction and found Kelly STILL working on the two toilets.  Hmmm....I left the women's bathroom and moved out of the room and down the hall to the men's room.

It was about the size of a small walk-in closet with a toilet and a sink.  I finished my sink/mirror job and went back to check on Kelly, assuming she would want to clean the toilet herself in the men's room.  She was just sweeping the women's room, and so I stood and watched her some, checking for signs of familiarity.

Kelly:  "What are you doing?  Where did you go?"
Me:  "Well, I was finished in here so I moved on to the men's room down the hall."
Kelly:  "There are still things to finish in this bathroom, you know."
Me:  "Uh huh.  Looks like you got this room under control so I'll just move back to the men's room."

I took the toilet cleaning stuff with me which consisted of a plastic curved handle and a container of white sponges with a thin layer of blue across the top.  I took out the sponge and examined the curved handle.  On the end of the handle was a pincher and so I tried pushing the plastic piece on the bottom of the sponge into the pincher.  It wouldn't click in and so I pressed a tad harder and then harder still.  Not getting anywhere I decided to survey the scene.  I moved my hand down on the handle and noticed that I was leaving a nice set of blue fingerprints all along the plastic handle.  I looked at my hand and realized that the thin, blue layer on the sponge was full of some type of cleaning solution that was now on my fingers.  I looked around for somewhere to put the handle and sponge and noticed that the handle had a button on it.  Pushing that button made the pincher open wide so that it could grip the plastic piece on the back of the sponge, creating a nice piece of toilet cleaning equipment.  Not quite as economical as my toilet brush at home, but I laid the thing in the toilet and proceeded to spend ten minutes washing the blue off of my fingers, which in turn dirtied up the sink I had just cleaned, and thus I had to start over.

Kelly:  "What are you doing?"
Me:  "Uh, cleaning the sink.  What are you doing?"
Kelly:  "Just checking to see what you were doing and emptying the trashcan in here."
Me:  "Are you done over there?"
Kelly:  "Almost.  I have to mop."

I finished cleaning the men's room, turned off the lights and joined Kelly for the next set of bathrooms which were at the front of the church.  Both of these bathrooms were quite large.  I opted for the men's room again, thinking it would be small like the last one.  It wasn't.  It was huge.  It had a large sink and a larger mirror that went all the way to the ceiling.  Around the corner from the sink was the tallest urinal I have ever seen in my life.  It came up to my chin and went all the way to the floor and was sitting on a small tiled area.  To the left of that was a stall that went the length of the wall and behind that was a toilet.  I surveyed the scene quite impressed with the layout and headed across the hall to survey the women's room.  Kelly was, of course, working on the toilets.

Kelly:  "What are you doing?"
Me:  "Uh, just checking out the bathroom."
Kelly:  "Well, I was going to have you clean the women's room, but you just went into the men's room."
Me:  "Uh, sorry."

I scurried back to the men's room, properly chastised, and got down to business.  I turned on my IPhone and went right to my new theme song, Good to be Me,  while I cleaned and sang along.  Unfortunately, I realized a tad too late, after belting out the refrain, that probably that wasn't quite the song one should have in the house of the lord.

Kelly:  "I wondered where that music was coming from."
Me:  "Oh, uh, well, yeah."
Kelly:  "Have you scrubbed the stall walls?  The handicap railing?"
Me:  "Jeez!  You act like I don't know what I'm doing."
Kelly:  "Did you clean wall behind the urinal?  I'm just saying..."

I waited until she left before hitting replay.  Then I grabbed some wipes and proceeded to backtrack to the stalls, the wall, and the handicap railing.  By the time I was finished with the men's room, Kelly was finishing up the women's room.  We met in the middle of the entryway, sweaty and huffing.  I thought we had two more bathrooms, but apparently Kelly had done those earlier in the week.  I sat on the stairs and waited for my next instruction, eyeing the boss with some suspicion.

Kelly:  "I'm miserably hot and sweaty and hunger as hell!"

My girl was back!  We picked up our supplies and the trash and headed out for some food and much needed margaritas.