It was a very old house and not in real good condition.

But it was a time when rentals were at a premium on the Monterey Bay and so after searching for a couple months and finding nothing and realizing that we had to lower our expectations we landed what we called The Norman Bates Motel.

I remember the first time we walked the yard, fell into a few gopher holes and peeked through a window, my husband was quiet for a while and then said, “I don’t have to stoop this low.”
My brain was thinking “Don’t be too sure, Chuckie!”

The only reason we even found the house was because it belonged to an employee where my husband worked and he’d heard we were looking for a place.
He was getting married and moving out so he offered it to us.

Once we would have put our noses up at it but not this time, this time we looked, gulped and grabbed…..and we were thankful for this dwelling.

My daughter, Sweet Melissa and I spent a week on our hands and knees scrubbing, trying to remove years of …….crud.

There’s only so much that can be done with a place nicknamed The Norman Bates Motel but we did the best we could to make it shine and we moved in.

Everything was “original”, meaning damn old!

No dishwasher but we DID have a garbage disposal so I had something to be thankful for.

It was summertime and we lived blocks away from the Pacific Ocean, and my family from back east were coming for fourth of July.

I was so excited and like anyone else, I wanted to be ready, clean house and fridge and cupboard stocked with all kinds of fun food and all kinds of drinks.
Just tryin‘ to be the hostess with the mostess.

They were gonna stay with us for a week.
A couple of our girls were also coming from Sacramento and it was gonna be a grand family get-together.

It was the day before arrival and I was in high gear with all sorts of last minute crap.
The last big thing I had to do was grocery shop but first I had to empty the fridge, wash the shelves and check to see what I needed.
Way in the back I found 2 large packages of cold cuts that I’d kinda forgotten about, that happens with 47 different things on my mind, I forget stuff.

Cold cuts were on my grocery list but this stuff had been in the fridge forgotten about for a couple weeks.
No way could we eat it, I didn’t even want to smell it.
I put it on the counter with a bunch of other left-overs and food that just needed to be tossed.

My mind really was elsewhere or I NEVER would have crammed about 2# of cold cuts, a couple blocks of cheese, wilted lettuce and anything else that was in the fridge and needed to go down that little garbage disposal hole.
I just crammed it all in, turned on the water, hit the switch and it was gone…………..or so I thought!

I grabbed my purse, my grocery list, my car keys and I was out the door.

My daughter Julie was on her way and I figured there was a big chance she’d arrive before I got back, and she did.

When I pulled up in the driveway she was sitting on the steps of the little front porch, and it looked like she was crying.

I stopped the car and hurried over to her, what the heck had happened?

In between loud wailing, she told the story of happily walking in the side door of the house, the laundry room door.

What she saw took a few minutes to comprehend.
There was shredded, chopped food covering the walls, the washing machine and dryer, the windows, the door, the curtains, even the ceiling.
She stood still looking around …..where the hell was she and why was there disgusting food covering the room?
WHAT THE HELL?

She went looking for us, where the heck were we?
She yelled out as she walked through the little house and finally found my husband in the back room.
Usually there’s happy faces and hugs when we all first see each other but not this time.
My husband looked at her stunned face and wanted to know what the heck?
She took him over to the laundry room and the two of them stood there, just staring.

At first they did nothing, they didn’t even speak, just stood still and their eyes scanned every wall, all covered with ground-up food.

One of them finally spoke and said the obvious…..”WHAT THE HELL?”

And then they saw it, the open pipe leading from the kitchen.
The jammed food had blasted the old piping open and it spit every item chewed up all over the laundry room and Julie was the lucky one to find it first.

You can’t walk away from something like that and so, for the next hour plus Julie and my husband cleaned, ham, turkey, cheese, old salad and everything else I shoved down that hole earlier off the walls and everywhere else it was shot out of the exploded pipe.

They grabbed rags, towels, buckets and they went to work.
When they’d done all they could, Julie went out on the porch and sobbed.
This was NOT the welcome she’d expected when she pulled up the driveway of the Norman Bates Motel.

She was sobbing in a dish towel.
She put her head up long enough to tell me her very first thought when she saw it was to grab her suitcase, walk up to a corner and wait for a bus outta Monterey!

Needless to say, I felt horrible.
I was the cruncher who’d shoved it all through the hole just to get it out of my sight and done.
Had I just walked a few feet to the laundry room, I would have seen that pipe spitting out all that food like I’ve seen potato guns spit out mashed potatoes!

For some time following that “incident” I found pieces of food in strange places of the laundry room.

A few weeks after “the incident,” my husband and I were out for lunch.
I was reading the menu and it said HAM AND CHEESE….. ON THE WALL!
I swear it did!
I saw it!
I blinked a few times and read it again and somehow the words had changed to HAM AND CHEESE ON RYE but
it WAS on that menu and, well…..I ordered a burger!!
To this day, my daughter will NOT eat a ham and cheese sandwich!