In her middle years my Aunt Beanie decided that her life had no meaning. Virtually all middle aged people inevitably have this thought from time to time, but in Beanie’s case it happened to be true.
Beanie was married to my mom’s brother, my Uncle Dick, who like all the men on that side of the family, was a heavy drinker. He passed out at the wedding reception and stayed drunk for the next 40 years. Sometime in the mid-1950s Uncle Dick sobered up long enough for the happy couple to beget an heir, a son who was nicknamed “Dung Beetle” as a toddler because he would — well, never mind; you don’t want to know. This name stuck until Cousin Dung Beetle died young of cirrhosis; please note that if you want to guarantee that your son will grow into a raging alcoholic, naming him Dung Beetle is a pretty good way to start.
Beanie was a typical post-war housewife, but not an efficient one. Not for her the hospital corner, the immaculate linoleum or windows you could see out of. Without the feminine skills that defined a 1950s homemaker Beanie, depressed, determined her life was meaningless.
It was 1969 when Beanie discovered the newspaper column that would change her life: “Hints from Heloise.” She waited impatiently for the Sunday paper each week and pored over Heloise’s hints. This is how Beanie learned to remove water stains from her coffee table with mayonnaise, and how to use a raw potato to remove excess salt from her soup. She learned to give the dog a tomato juice bath if it annoyed a skunk. Beanie learned that you could clean anything with baking soda and that vinegar was God’s gift to housewives.
Eventually Heloise began publishing household tips sent in by her readers, and Beanie saw her chance for fulfillment. If Heloise would print one of her household hints, she reasoned, she would have achieved her life’s purpose. Thus began Beanie’s obsessive quest to discover the perfect household hint.
The problem was that Beanie lacked imagination, so her hints were, at best, derivative of hints she had already read and at worst they were dangerously stupid. For example, she ruined a set of draperies by staining them with grape juice and then trying to remove the stains with mayonnaise. She made a paste of sea salt to remove the dark circles around her eyes and looked like a raccoon for months afterward. She tried to clean Uncle Dick’s nasty arm chair with tomato juice.
Faced with unending defeat, Beanie veered into more extreme experiments, like when she tried to clean her grout with a potent combination of Clorox and ammonia. But she was not a quitter and as soon as she got out of the ER she kept trying. It was around then that she was inspired to invent a feminine hygiene product that combined vinegar and baking soda. This did not end well.
Eventually Beanie got discouraged and one Saturday afternoon, dejected, she sat in her chair next to the comatose Dick and stared mutely out the filthy window knowing that it would take a miracle for her to find that one magic household hint that would elevate her to fame. That was her “A-ha!” moment: A minute later, inspired, she ran to the kitchen for the Miracle Whip which she smeared all over the window; it was kind of gloppy but when she wiped it off, the window was spotless.
Beanie’s life finally had meaning ,and six months later she sent Heloise’s column to everyone she knew: “Dirty windows? Beanie Chipka from Cleveland says to rub Miracle Whip on the window and wipe it off for a miraculous shine. Good idea, Beanie!”