Broken Glass

I don’t want to talk to Jim or Micky or Napoleon Solo or anyone else! I want to talk to Ariel and Claudia, and I want this mess cleaned up NOW!

My mom had lost it. And for good reason. One of her blue bottles that was part of her collection of random things, including the dried bat wings, the cow jawbone, and the box of sand dollars, had fallen and smashed to pieces as my sister had tried to climb in the secret hiding spot (slash) getaway tunnel that was beneath the bay window in our old Victorian house in San Francisco.

It was Summer, 1985. My sister was eight and I was eleven, and we were in character, as usual. Jim, Micky, and Napoleon Solo were the characters from our favorite TV shows: Mission: Impossible!, The Monkees, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., respectively. My mom had told us to clean up the broken glass, and we had started to explain in weird deep voices about the getaway tunnel, and Napoleon Solo was just about to escape from his captives, and then we’d clean it up. She didn’t care.

We had been ignoring our chores all day. We thought that a much more fun way to do the five loads of laundry we had on our list would be to pretend each basket had some very important items for Barney from Mission: Impossible!, who was in the basement trying to secure the phone taps. So Jim lowered the basket down on a rope from the second floor to the backyard. There, Barney gave Jim the thumbs up and took the basket into the laundry room in the basement. We had to, of course, use walkie-talkies to measure the progress Barney was making, which was slow, considering Barney was getting the phones wired and whatnot, effectively forgetting about really doing the laundry.

My mom found me making huge pulleys in my bedroom out of my dad’s old boating ropes and asked if the laundry was done. We’re doing it now. And it’s not laundry, it’s important stuff for Barney’s part of the mission.

When she realized we had only gotten one of the baskets to the basement, none of the laundry actually in the machine, and I was still tying ropes together up in my bedroom, my mom started to get mad.

Get down there and do that laundry – now!

She didn’t understand. We needed the rope pulleys to do the laundry. But I complied and we changed the mission a little, as we often had to do when mom butted in.

Jim got interrupted by The Enemy, I radioed Barney. She’s coming down. Red alert!

Ten-four! Barney replied. The phrase red alert was actually from Star Trek, and ten-four was a phrase we heard on our dad’s police transmitter he had hooked up to “listen for fires”, but we kind of mixed it all together. Whatever sounded official was good to use. As characters from one show, we often met characters from other shows – like Micky Dolenz from The Monkees often met Jim from Mission: Impossible! for part of the mission, that kind of thing. It made it a little more interesting.

My mom was also probably really tired of overhearing herself being referred to as the enemy. So, by the time the glass jar fell, she was really on her last nerve. As we swept up the glass, we decided we would sign out of this mission and work on updating some items for Jim’s briefcase. Then, we went to Star Magic on 24th Street and bought some stickers with our allowance, and focused on being little girls for a while.