I live in fits and starts.  Last week, after a weekend of squalor, I decided to clean up my very small and crammed with electronics apartment.  I did the curtains, sprayed them with anti-static, hung them, did all the laundry, and then I broke out the vacuum.  My old, trusty Kirby.  Love it.  Big Red.

 

I love it because I used to live, thirty years ago, about four thousand feet higher than I do now, and at nine thousand feet no emphysema-laden gerbil of a vacuum is going to work well.  Back then, in the nadir of American industrial quality, the various vacuum manufacturers were buckling on all sorts of gadgets, like carpet shampooers, to a machine that barely had the horsepower to gag its way through a modest shag carpet.  We tried them all, and weren’t happy with any of them.  We lived in the country, had two dogs, two cats, and boots of countless visitors all the time.  My wife and I liked a warm house and bare feet, and it was not possible with these exhausted but loud vacuums with no lungs whatever.

 

A friend knew someone who sold Kirbys.  I tried to borrow one, but he said no, he’d bring one up and prove what a macho machine it was.  He did, it was.  It scorched through the rugs and obviously gave them a superior scrubbing than any of the others.  Better, it had its own carpet shampoo system which also worked well.  We bought it.  For the remaining four years of our marriage, it was a godsend in keeping the place clean.  It had problems, of course.  It weighed a ton, was loud, and it was an issue to change belts and clean the brushes, much less put on the shampooer, but it worked well; better, in any case, than the competition.  You remember such with fondness.  A friend out of nowhere.  I drove neighbors on Twin Sisters Ranch batty declaiming the virtues of the Kirby.

 

When all fell to pieces and I had to leave, confronted with various and strange things I felt necessary to take with me, I took the vacuum.   But you take care of friends.  You do.  For the next twenty years it went with me everywhere.  It lived with me in The Boulder Theater, and relentlessly swept up after shows of a thousand people.  I rolled it to friends’ houses when I went to clean them.   It went to storage when I went to jail.  It came with me to my new apartment last year.

 

I had gotten worried about seepage around my windows, because it seemed like there was a lot of dust on the television and monitor screens and in the fan casings of the computers.  It actually smelled dusty sometimes.  Whatever it was, it couldn’t be my vacuum: my friend of thirty odd years now that had always done what was expected of it to improve my living conditions.

 

But when I started coughing on the phone, and noting small cumuli of particulates when I sat down, or that seasonal planting could begin on the television screen a day after cleaning it, I had to admit something was wrong.  It was.  The cloth vacuum bag belched dust when on, so I got a new one, it belched as much – the bag wasn’t new really, it was just new to me: they don’t make them anymore.  The pig iron had worn and the washers didn’t seal it.  It was, given its age, not surprisingly too old and worn out.   This was, startlingly, depressing.  Very.

 

Something you use every day – well, for the sake of conversation – for years is hard to dispose of in moments of logic.  But I had to admit it made no sense to merely redistribute the dust around the apartment, increasing static worries, health issues, and comfort.  I just hadn’t noticed it before: that after thirty years of increasing decrepitude, the old red Kirby ain’t what she once was. 

 

But somewhere in there were the undercoats of beloved dogs, the cells of friends and lovers, the fragrances and detritus of my middle life, the one with a wife, the one with a theater, the one with more youthful vigor than I felt at present.  And I have retained so little of those years, it seemed sad to depart with one so closely entwined with my days then.  Cruel even.  To myself most of all.

 

“Dick, it’s a damned vacuum cleaner,” explained one friend.  “Get that ugly, broken old dusty piece of shit out of your apartment,” she said.  “Really, look,” and she patted my newly made bed and  clouds arose.  

 

“It’s a great machine,” I said, and explained how it outperformed all the others.

 

“Thirty years ago, maybe,” she said.   “Virtually any new vacuum is a zillion times better, lighter, more powerful today.”  She sniffed the air with concern.  “In any case, this apartment is a mess.”

 

It was an effort.  It was an argument.  But I finally broke down and bought one and noticed the difference within about a minute.  Which is to say after one swing around what I thought was a clean living room, the clear container of the new vacuum was full.  With these new ones, it’s like emptying a wastebasket into the trash.  No replacement bags. 

 

Also, no dust bunnies in the computers, no coughing fits.  No squinting at the television screen to see through a deep sludge of static attracted dust.  No dust.

 

I appreciate the new machine.  It is immeasurably better, lighter, handier (no big production of getting the hose on; it’s all ready to go always) but I have not attained an emotional contact with it.  It is not the companion I once had and could relate to.

 

“Visit it in your storage locker downstairs,” my friend said.  And I do.  I hold out that I’ll have a garage someday, and need something to sweep up the big stuff.  I like knowing it’s there.  “You’re the only person I know who gets teary over a household appliance going bad.”

 

“Thirty years,” I said.

 

“Yes, well, time to move on,” and she patted my head. 

 

I knew that.  She doesn’t have to rub it in.