Dotty Parker

row your own hoe

I've been reminiscing recently about odd things from years past. They seem to have no connection to each other, except for their oddness. Perhaps there doesn't need to be a connection. The memories just swim together like demented porpoises following a ship of fools.

Today I started saying in my head, "row your own hoe." I was thinking, "hoe your own row" but even in my head the words got a little screwy. I thought, "Why the hell am I talking (to myself) about that?" The answer came a few minutes later.

When we first moved here, I had a series of temp jobs, all of which were predictably bizarre. One of them was at a commercial lab that tested milk, food, grain, hay, feed for their components. I worked in the fiber division. The more interesting was the protein part while the coolest looking was the trace minerals. There was another part, but I didn't work with them, so I can't remember what they did. Maybe carbohydrates or nutrients and vitamins.

It was completely weird. My boss was this very small red haired woman with a wicked temper. In my foolishness, however, I didn't care about her temper and I just laughed thinking it was a joke and teasing her about it. I'm a genius, I tell you.

I sang a song to her on a Thursday like, "Oh, Margie hates Thur-urs-days! I'll tell you why--cause they send us those sample-ays--oh piled high!" It went on like that for a while until a co-worker gave me the eye to shut up. Which I did. Margie wasn't pleased by my song which was composed as I sang it and was very clever, but never said anything to me. Weird.

At lunch, there was a cafeteria room where everybody ate and the tables all had their hierarchy. One woman, we'll call her SciFi sat by herself and wanted to sit by herself and wrote in her spiral bound notebook the whole time.

This lady worked in the dishwashing room with another woman. They shared the job and there was always a kind of ripple of tension from the room because of SciFi's performance. SciFi was developmentally disabled, but did her job pretty well. Where her talents really shone was in complaining.

We used Ball Mason jars for most of the samples. The company was growing--Frito-Lay was using our services (I tested the fiber in Doritos)--and they weren't buying Ball Mason jars as quickly as they could have been. So the cushion of already clean jars was pretty thin. Sometimes we used them up faster than they were cleaned.

Of the many dishwashing scandals to take place at the Dairy Herd Milk Testing Center, I shall set forth a few.

One was the drying problem. The jars had to be perfectly dry or the mass of the sample would be incorrect. I never entered the dishwashing room (one of my wiser moves, I must say) so I don't know how it was set up. But! SciFi apparently knocked over a rack of dry jars. A rack of jars that was needed!

Oh God! Please send us some new Ball Mason jars! The farmers' cows may die if we don't know how many grams of fat and protein are in Doritos or cake mix!

There was some issue of blame and umbrage was taken by SciFi and there was muttering in the cafeteria room that day.

As for the spiral bound notebook: she wrote in it every day. She carried it around with her almost everywhere. One day during lunch a guy, we'll call him Dingo, picked up the notebook and started to read it. Horrified, Miss Dotty came to SciFi's rescue and said, "Don't read that! It's her diary; it's not yours to read!!"

Dingo laughed and said, "It's not her diary, Dot. She's got scripts in here. She writes scripts for Star Trek and sends them in." The rest of the group started filling in details, like what happened when the show changed from The Next Generation to Deep Space Nine and then on to Buck Rogers and then to Star Wars. She kept writing scripts, but we could never determine which set of shows she was writing for.

The whole rowing your own hoe came from SciFi. There was a day when the woman who usually worked in the dishwashing room with her was out for some reason. This meant that SciFi had to get the job done by herself. Admittedly, she had a lot of work to do, but you also have to admit that the woman who didn't show up probably didn't do it out of spite.

So as SciFi walked to the cafeteria room, she could be heard muttering, "I know you want your jars, but there are some people around here who don't hoe their own row."

"What the hell does that mean?" I probably asked Margie (I think we got along okay as long as I wasn't singing to her). She said, "Oh, she thinks that the other gal's not pulling her weight since she isn't here today."

Happily, I got the two explanations I needed. I'd never heard the expression "hoe your own row", and sure didn't know what SciFi was talking about.

Oh, and this--SciFi is the only person who can actually mutter. I've heard cartoon characters do it, but SciFi wins the prize for real live muttering.

So that's where row your own hoe came from. The answer to why it showed up today isn't really in the cards.

Posted by dotty at October 20, 2003 06:51 PM