Lightfinger Louie Lurking at Local Laundromat

We barely made it out of there alive.

A number of years ago I made my first ever in my life trip to a laundromat.

Since that time, I have had to, out of necessity, made many more trips to the neighborhood “Fluff ‘n’ Fold” (or some variation of that name).

Today was one of those days. Our washer gave up the ghost last week and the part required to revive the poor, over-worked machine won’t be in until next week.

Once again, I had been reduced to wearing unusual clothing combinations—mismatched socks, a pair of my father’s sweatpants, and my mother’s purple tunic sweater that has flowers and kittens and butterflies and smiling frogs embroidered on it (the only one that fit me even halfway as my mother is, how shall I say this?—endowed—and I, admittedly, am not. I think, no, I hope, that someone bought this sweater for her rather than to think she saw this “beauty” and decided she had to have it. Thankfully, undergarments can be hand washed—I shudder to think of having to, well, you get my drift.

Armed with three baskets of clothes and sheets and towels, and a bag of detergent, stain remover, and dryer sheets, we headed down the road to the laundromat.

This brand new laundromat has those great triple capacity front-loaders—beautiful stainless steel machines built by a company called Dexter. (Anyone who really knows me knows that I love appliances.)

“Wonderful—we can do the three sets of sheets and all the towels in one load!” Mom’s glee, however, was short-lived. 


Yesterday, while we were at Kroger, she only asked the clerk for $5 in quarters with which to do the laundry. It costs $5.25 for one load. Mom has not been to a laundromat since she and Dad lived in Sacramento the year I was born, which was back in 19 . . . uh, was a number of years ago.

Mom starts digging through her purse for more quarters.

“Ma, there’s a change machine . . .”

Now she digs for singles.

“Hey Ma, it takes twenties!”

That, dear Reader, should have been my mother’s second clue (the first being the boldly-lettered prices marked on the washers) that we were not in the 50’s California anymore.

While I am standing at the coin dispenser catching quarters as if it’s a Las Vegas slot machine, Mom loads another triple-sized washer with our remaining laundry.

I hasten over, pour in the detergent (Mom is three inches short of being able to see the top of the washer where the detergent goes), and add the coins. In the meantime, Mom takes the laundry baskets, our purses, and rolling carts to a table and sits down.

We chat. We check the time on the washers. We chat more. The washers are done and Mom and I load the wet laundry into the rolling carts and wheel them over to the dryers. A young mother is loading clothes into a dryer two down from ours.

A personable man of about my age approaches.

“Did you happen to take one of these carts with a white laundry basket in it?” he asks.

(Okay, I am not being hit on . . .) “Sorry, no I didn’t.” Big smile.

“Just ours,” Mom says.

I look over at the table we were occupying a few moments before. There sits, not three, but four while laundry baskets. 


“Ma?”

Lightfinger Louis has struck again.

“Ma, that top basket isn’t ours!” I rush over to retrieve it for the poor man. 


Mom, ever the charmer, says, “I do things like that all the time.”

“Ma!”

The young woman at the dryers says sotto voce, “Better check your pockets.”

The personable man smiles kindly at my mother and says all is forgiven.

The young woman at the dryers says sotto voce, “Might want to check your car.”

Later, after I had secured my mother to the table, I apologized to the personable man and told him I’d be committing her to a (insert air quotes here) home this week.

The young woman at the dryers counted her clothes.

Henry staggered up the stairs, his bloody hand sliding along the rough stone wall . . .

This morning, my father and I were discussing opening lines—the line that sets the tone for the entire novel, news article, etc.,—the Gotchya!

Edward George Bulwer-Lytton wrote what is quite possibly the most famous of the essential killer opening lines in his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford:  

“It was a dark and stormy night;  . . .”

Had the author said nothing else, you would have been able to imagine the scene—we have all seen dark and stormy nights. Yet, continue he does and we are pulled into the story even further:

“. . . the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

Dear Reader, your mission, should you care to accept it (another great opening line—from the Mission Impossible series) is to write one line and one line only. Don’t even think about where the rest of the story is going. Write one truly sticky (the one that won’t let you go) first line. Don’t give away the farm in that one line! You have to make the reader want to move on to the second line.

Post your killer line in the comments section and later we’ll discuss the best of our best.

Henry of the bloodied hand? Hmmmm, . . . I’ll have to see what’s going on there.