Lorelai Gilmore's Grandmother

Although it kind of lost it in the end (as so many TV shows do), I was a big fan of Gilmore Girls for most of its run. It was the kind of show that could almost always cheer me up after a really bad day. Nothing I had seen on television, before or since, was ever quite the same as the rapid-fire banter between Lorelai and Rory; no mother-daughter relationship was ever as bad as the one between Lorelai and Emily.

For those of you who haven't watched the show, a little background. The basic tension in the show was between the controlling Emily Gilmore and the freespirited Lorelai, who had left her wealthy but stifling girlhood home after becoming pregnant at the tender age of sixteen. As the show began, Lorelai was forced to re-establish a relationship with Emily after her daughter Rory, now sixteen herself, was admitted to a private school Lorelai could not afford any other way. In return for paying for Rory's tuition, Emily insisted that Lorelai and Rory come for dinner every Friday night. This made the Gilmores about the most Jewish upper-crust WASP family I've heard of, but I digress.

I think my favorite Gilmore Girls' episode was the one dealing with the death of Lorelai's paternal grandmother, known to one and all as Trix. Played expertly by Marion Ross, Trix had been brought into the show a few times as a foil to Emily. Basically, Trix was every bit as controlling to Emily as Emily was to Lorelai. And Emily couldn't take it in the least.

On Trix's death, Emily was left to handle the funeral arrangements but, after learning that Trix had tried to prevent her from marrying her son, refused to lift another finger. So it fell on Lorelai to take care of Trix's final wishes.

Though at first intensely solicitous of taking care of Trix's funeral arrangments, Lorelai eventually gave up herself. The scene in which she does so is classic. Trix's will had specified that she be buried in "fresh" underwear. Lorelai could not decipher the meaning of "fresh": did itmean clean underwear? Did it mean new underwear? After telling the whole long story to a clerk in a lingerie shop, Lorelai finally threw in the towel.

Well, Lorelai Gilmore may have known what "fresh" underwear meant. But after a week of living on two pairs of underwear and no access to a washing machine, I think I have some idea. It means underwear whose cleanliness you are sure of.

And so I give thanks--at last--to the arrival of my second suitcase, containing more fresh underwear than I could shake a stick at. I have made a promise to myself that I will start washing my clothes each night after I take them off, so that they don't become a massive pile I have to do every Sunday. But were it not for that, I would gladly spend the next week relishing in not having to wash underpants in the bathroom sink.