Wednesday, March 31

March 31, Wednesday - Came home. Rather hated to leave hospital. Made a lot of friends and met some old ones from the store. House looked so nice and clean. Marv worked so hard on it. Furnace is nice. Marv took Bud to Doctor - he has deep sinus infection.

Home is a special place, more so when you've been away for a while. Dad worked tirelessly to get the place cleaned up for mom's return home. I remember one night that he and I polished and waxed the hardwood floors throughout the house. He could get a bit obsessive, but I also know that he was trying to stay distracted.

Dad was a believer in paint for everything. Our little house was probably a couple of inches smaller inside after all the coats of paint dad put on the walls over the years. I did not get dad's obsessive paint gene.

Our heat plant was a gas-fired floor convection furnace. There was no blower, no heat vents save the large grate in the floor, no return air. When it came on, it did so with a satisfying "whump", and the house heated slowly and mostly unevenly. We often closed off the front of the house to keep the main section warmer. Poor folks have poor ways.

Mom had the chair closest to the furnace, that seat befitting her role as breadwinner. Dad, however, controlled the thermostat. I think it was my friend from across the street, Steve, who christened my dad "Thermostat Rex".

Every fall, dad would take the grate from the floor and vacuum the inside of the sheetmetal heat exchanger, light the pilot light, and balance a square cake pan on top of the exchanger. As the weather went from cool to cold, dad added water to the pan to keep some humidity in the house.

Thinking back, I can't imagine how we all avoided a quiet death by carbon monoxide poisoning.

When my hair went from Vitalis and Brylcreem to Beach Boys to Beatles and far beyond, the furnace served as a rustic, awkward, but extremely efficient hairdryer. This was years before the invention of the handheld hairdryer. 

Google "Remington Hot Comb". 

When you came in from shoveling snow or trying to dig the car out of a snowdrift on 11th Street, standing on the floor grate wrapped you in an column of warm, dry air and you had to be careful if you were still wearing rubber overshoes, or you'd melt the soles to the grate. Even the smell of burning shoes somehow smelled like home.

One of the happiest moments of my life was in 1970 watching the Girl from Iowa drying her chestnut hair over that grate.