Cleaning

My second most important job on the Christmas trains is cleaning. Not easy anyway, but also fraught with all sorts of issues.

Since the people who come on our Polar Express show trains pay $30 per adult and $20 per non lap child, it is my feeling that they should be seated in cars that are clean. Our passenger cars are all about 1925 vintage, so they show their age. The floors are particularly difficult since they are cement and the ground outside is coarse grit. This literally acts like sandpaper, especially when it rains.

Last year, I tried to clean with brooms and the museum’s vacuum cleaners but the vacs have been mistreated, and always need new filters or bags which can’t be found. There is no nearby electricity in any case. So I went out and bought a sort of compact sized shop vac, and now I drive my truck with generator on the tailgate up and down the “consist” of cars ready for the Xmas train.

One day my visiting daughter ( nice hostess…) swept two of the cars, filling the dustpan. I later was told that they had already been cleaned. I really got disgusted by this. The person who supposedly cleaned must have done what I call zombie cleaning. Mostly practiced by men, this involves moving the cleaning tool in the general vicinity of the dirty area and assigning a random amount to time to continue doing this. Then, in their minds, they have cleaned. Any cursory inspection of the area will reveal plenty of debris, dust and perhaps Leggos that have been left behind. In the case of the RR cars, the debris included 10-15 brightly colored jelly beans, 5 paper wrappers, 4 crumpled napkins, a lost sleigh bell, enough cookie bits to make 2 or 3 whole cookies, and plenty of just plain sand.

And then there is zombie mopping. This entails a big yellow janitor bucket and a disgusting string mop. Since getting a clean bucket of water to the train is a good 50 yard trek, and the attached wheels are useless in sand or on a train, the technique involves getting the first 10 feet fairly clean, then after than the water is as dirty as the floor, soon dirtier, and the string mop spats dirty water over the lower 4” of the cream colored wall. And leaves brown puddles in all corners.

Since the people in charge of this production either literally can’t see the dirt or avert their eyes so they don’t have to deal with it, I should just go along with their standards of clean, and avert my eyes too. In truth, the cars are boarded at dusk, the ride is in the dark, and the cars are dimly lit to conserve their batteries. The passengers are all over excited, get entertained in various ways, and probably don’t even look at the floor. “ They’ll never see it from the second row” is what you say in the theater when someone is fussing over tiny details.

But no. I apparently am still burdened by that scourge of womanhood: you are how you clean. Good Housekeeping seal of approval, Martha Stewart, and legions of (mostly) male run corporations that sell us the tools and chemicals, have ganged up on me, and brainwashed me.

I also get disgusted that a number of people actually put in a lot of time and energy on zombie cleaning, get praised and generally pat themselves on the back. Not that they don’t applaud my work, but it all seems incredibly Sysiphisan and torturous.

I wonder if I am being like the Dutch housewives that go out and scrub down their front steps every day. Do they still do that?

My personal living space is usually not ready for Martha Stewart, a certain amount of clutter from projects not finished, or left out as a reminder. After a full day of work, I’m not about to start cleaning. The small size of even Don’s palatial 5th wheel is pretty easy to keep clean, even though there is no “mud room”, and the Airstream can be spit shined in an hour. But if I know someone is coming, especially if I don’t know them, then I kind of go into a frenzy of cleaning, probably a displacement activity for being a little nervous about what they will think of me.

First impressions, the book’s cover, we do tend to make at least a preliminary judgment on the worth of a person by their clothes, their car, their personal hygiene, and sadly how clean their house is. I guess that is why I really want our funky train museum not to flunk its inspection.