By BILLY MURPHY
Laugh Lines

There are a few things I can count on in life: death, taxes, seeing Elian Gonzales on every news report and the bathroom closet at my mom's house never changing.

There are simple shelves with our whole family history in there. On the floor of the closet is a makeshift hamper. It was a modest concept. My mother made it easy for any of one of my two sisters, two brothers or myself to just pick up our clothes and place them inside the door, on the floor.

Only problem: That modest concept worked about as well as Internet security at Yahoo. Seemingly with the will of a pack of Afghan rebels, none of us kids would put our dirty clothes there. It was if we had all gotten together and determined that any bare spot on any bedroom floor was a more fitting place.

Today still, the empty void awaits.

The first shelf up in the closet is for first aid. There are at least six shoe boxes of medical supplies. One is typical flu and cold drugs, though a fever in our house had to reach at least 104 before my mom would administer something as precarious as aspirin.

My mom had a particular fear of drugs. She took my little sister Missy to the hospital and had her stomach pumped once when she thought she had eaten a whole bottle of baby aspirin. Upon returning we discovered they had just fallen behind the refrigerator. I guess my mom thought my sister had also devoured the actual bottle.

Once before that, even, she had taken my twin, Mike, to the hospital for putting a button up his nose. (I know this has nothing to do with medical supplies but I like to tell that story on him any chance I get.)

There is a box, too, with antiseptics for cuts and burns and the like. Funny, though, my mom would always bypass such “cooling” supplies like triple antibiotic or first aid cream, for straight alcohol. If any of us needed more than just that acid bath she would apply Merthiolate. Not Mercurochrome, the medicine modern science had invented without the sting, but its big prickly sister. The rest of the boxes contained what seemed to be leftover field supplies from my dad's hitches in World War II and the Korean War.

Shelf two in the closet holds towels. To this day I have an obsessive compulsive habit because of those towels. I collect them, store them, hoard them, use as many as I get my hands on. It is because when I grew up, you would have thought the ones in our house were remnants of the Shroud of Turin.

First, my mom inventoried them as though they were gold (in my seventh grade year the Federal Reserve Bank sent experts to copy her techniques). Second, she only had those small towels about the size of the ones the swimmers use in the Olympics. And then, she always washed them in fabric softener so they would not absorb water. Seemingly, you would just use them to push the water around on your body until the friction caused evaporation.

Shelf three still contains linens: sheets and pillowcases and blankets. And, oh, the blankets! It's ironic we have so many blankets considering the stinginess about towels. You could be bleeding to death and needing a tourniquet and my mom wouldn't give you a towel (I guess she figured the alcohol would do the trick). But, don't worry cause if you fell into shock she could pour on the spreads like syrup on Rosie O'Donnel's pancakes.

The top shelf was mostly just for spare towels (hermetically sealed in plastic) and blankets. It's funny how the closet shrunk over the years. When I was a kid I had to use a chair to see on the top shelf. Now it holds no mystery at all except that my mother had “her” way of caring for us and that's a mystery I'm finally beginning to understand.

[Visit Billy Murphy on the Internet at http://billymurphy.homepage.com/00/closet.htm.]

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