Eventually I pick them up. Sometimes it just takes awhile.
Michael, the owner of the Chinese hand laundry was climbing on the counter to reach my shirts from a higher shelf.
I looked at my ticket. Apricot. The ones on the shelf below mine were pale pink.
“Are the pink ones newer?” I asked, needing to solve a nagging lifelong mystery.
“Yes,” Michael responded.
If the apricot-colored tickets are newer, I thought, what about all the other pastel- colored tickets? The ones attached to the ubiquitous brown paper packages tied up with string which line all the walls in the place.
“We weren’t that old,” I said to my husband as I walked out, feeling just slightly less guilty than I normally do.
I’ve been dropping off our shirts at San Toy Laundry since 1988, when I moved to Park Slope, Michael once told The New York Times, “This is an old-fashioned kind of laundry — you don’t have them anymore…there used to be five Chinese laundries in Park Slope. Not anymore.”
I grew up with these laundries, where Chinese immigrants pressed the shirts by hand. They were once all over the city. I remember my dad dropping off his shirts at Yike Lee, in Yorkville, where I grew up, on 85th and Second. He would carry the brown package home and let me untie the string. Eh voila – I was greeted by a crisp, neatly pressed stack of folded patterned shirts bound by a pastel green strip of paper.
San Toy has not changed one bit since the first day I entered. It might have looked new in 1962. As it turns out this space has been occupied by a Chinese laundry for over a century, changing hands throughout the years.
The thing about San Toy is that it is cash only. Which brings me to why it sometimes takes me awhile. It’s a bad habit, and I have no excuse. I just sometimes drop shirts off then forget about them. Sadly, judging by the packages along the wall, I’m not the only one.
“These are all old — years ago,” Michael’s wife told The Times, “waving at most of the shirts and reaching up to pull down a random package. Never claimed. Its tag was from 2006.”
“People move away, they forget to pick them up,” she said of the packages. “But if we threw them away, the shelves would look empty, and we would not look busy.”
Indeed, they are faded -- even the pastel blues, greens, and yellows are washed out — compared to the fresher ones on the opposite shelves. Yet, even though, you need the ticket to retrieve your shirts – Michael gives you one that matches the one he pins to your bundle – he was kind enough to find our shirts when I once lost mine. It took a little time but his patience, and ever-present smile, reminded me why the neighborhood business, whether it’s the deli, bookshop, or dry cleaner, is so vital.
Several years ago, I dropped off a jacket at a dry cleaner after I wore it to an event at a school which closed at the end of that year. Not needing professional clothing for several months, I completely forgot about the jacket, having yet again misplaced the ticket. Several years went by. Then I remembered. Humbly, I walked in and asked the owner if she could help me. I described the jacket.
“When did you bring it in?” she asked.
“Two years ago,” I answered.
“Two years?!” she asked.
She searched, she parted plastic bags, then she emerged, holding my jacket, perfectly pressed on its wire metal hanger.
At my regular dry cleaner, the old school ticket is no longer necessary. The computer knows where my clothing is, so not matter how many tickets I lose, the lovely woman behind the counter can always help.
Yet those pretty pastel tickets – what is it about them? As long as they exist, they remind me of the almost anachronistic analog world I grew up in, one that was not necessarily better, but that was somehow simpler, a bit more tactile, that gave you a certain satisfaction in clutching a pale colored laundry check, one that required you to also clutch something else: cold hard cash.
One beautiful bonus of walking into San Toy: “The rotary phone on the wall still works, and San Toy’s phone number — NEvins-8-3477 — has not changed since the 1930s.” – The New York Times.