I have written a lot about my mother and some of the wonderful legacies she left me. This is not one of those columns.
This is about her doobie.
No, not that doobie, her kitchen doobie rag. Except it was a paper towel.
Probably because she was a child of the Great Depression, Mom abhorred waste of any kind. I mean, she wasn’t a hoarder, but she believed in getting the good out of everything, including paper towels.
Every day she got a new paper towel, regulation size ( this was before create your own size) and used it throughout the day for small spills, drips and the like. It often lasted long enough to serve as her coaster for the toddy glass that accompanied the evening news.
It was not used for cleaning, but for catching the miscellaneous fallout of washing dishes and drippings on the counter, dabbing hands that had just put the milk carton back in the fridge, that sort of thing.
But thinking back, I don’t really remember using or having paper towels before I started high school. And no, I am not that old. There were paper towels, we just didn’t use them.
Looking at it now through the lens of experience, I suspect we couldn’t afford them. It was something that could be replaced with cloth rags and we got along just fine. It was a painless economy.
Later, when there were fewer messy kids in the house, and even those kids were older and not so spill prone, Mom still couldn’t force herself to grab a new paper towel for every little thing and the doobie rag was born.
I have no idea where she got the name. Maybe from Frank Sinatra’s song “Strangers in the Night,” with the shooby doobie do refrain. I’ll never know.
But for the rest of Mom’s life, the doobie rag held a place of prominence on the kitchen counter or table. It was like the sun, it was just always there.
Recently, there was a lapse in the paper towel supply here at the office. They are just one of those things that are easy to forget to restock.
But when the void was filled, I recognized how much the break room table needed to be wiped down. I cleaned several days’ accumulation of coffee spills. If you know anything about newspaper people, you know we are fueled by coffee. A lot of coffee, made strong.
So it got its wipe down, but there was residual cleaning solution on the surface. I took down an additional paper towel and dampened it slightly, then gave the table another swipe.
But the paper towel had more mileage in it. It wasn’t shot, not by a long shot.
So I folded it carefully and left it purposefully near the now-cold coffee pot. You never know when you’ll need more than a tissue, but less than a new paper towel. That’s when it’s time to reach back into memory and pull out the doobie rag.