– In which Dorn indulges in chore nostalgia.
saw a notice of a new book published just last week, How to wash dishes by Peter Miller. From the blurb, it sounds to be full of be-here-now wisdom, to teach you how to find joy in the simple things. It got me pondering the highs and lows of my 60+ years of washing dishes.
(Admittedly, the highs aren’t that high and the lows aren’t that low. It’s washing dishes.)
Buddhists (well, one Buddhist at least) say that washing dishes can be contemplative, even zen. Thich Naht Hanh wrote a piece (here) describing the benefits he gains from washing dishes.
He says “the idea that doing dishes is unpleasant can occur only when you aren’t doing them. Once you are standing in front of the sink with your sleeves rolled up and your hands in the warm water, it is really quite pleasant.” This sounds plausible, though it strains my credulity when he describes the pleasure of washing dishes every day for a hundred monks in an unheated mountain monastery, where the only materials he had to scour the dishes were, apparently, ice, and dirt.
Another story of washing dishes hard way is found in the delightful movie Cold Comfort Farm (1995) with Kate Beckinsale and Ian McKellen. The movie reminded me of a P. G. Wodehouse comedy, without as many intricate plot twists but otherwise with all the class spoofing and other satisfactions. It was based on a 1932 book of the same name by Stella Gibbons, about newly-orphaned Flora’s visit to, and transformation of, the bleak and dissipated Sussex farm of the title.
One of my favorite scenes from the movie was Flora’s attempt to get the handyman Adam to use a scrub brush, instead of a twig pulled from the thorn tree in the yard, to wash the dishes. Here’s how that’s described in the book:
“Oh, Adam, here’s your little mop. I got it in Howling this afternoon. Look, isn’t it a nice little one? You try it, and see.”
He took it between his finger and thumb and stood gazing at it. His eyes had filmed over like sightless Atlantic pools before the flurry of the storm breath. His gnarled fingers folded round the handle. “Ay. . . ’tes mine,” he muttered. “Nor house nor kine, and yet ’tes mine. . . . My little mop!” He stood staring at it in a dream.
“Yes. It’s to cletter the dishes with,” said Flora, firmly, suddenly foreseeing a new danger on the horizon.
“Nay. . . nay,” protested Adam. “’Tes too pretty to cletter those great old dishes wi’. I mun do that with the thorn twigs; they’ll serve. I’ll keep my liddle mop in the shed, along wi’ our [cows] Pointless and Feckless.”
(It’s funnier in the movie (and the book) than this little snippet does justice.)
To stray a bit further off-topic, my favorite running joke from the movie (and the book) is the war-cry of crazy Great Aunt Ada Doom: “I SAW SOMETHING NASTY IN THE WOODSHED!”
Moral: if you haven’t, see the movie, or read the book!
My own memories of washing dishes are fond. When I was growing up, I had a regular chore of washing the dishes in the house. We had wheel-of-fortune like chore wheel to decide how the jobs were to be distributed among the five kids each day. One was washing the supper dishes, so (I assume) I must have washed dishes approximately one day out of every five.
Only we didn’t call it a chore wheel. It was known in our house as a “Kaper Chart”. This term originated in the Girl Scouts, and I have to admit that as a branding idea, it’s genius. Nobody likes doing chores, but kapers, now, that sounds zany, adventurous and a bit capricious (the words “capricious” and “kaper” come from the root, clearly). Taking out the trash? Watch out for bandits!
You ask, how do I know so much about Girl Scout arcana? My mother was a Girl Scout leader, my three sisters were Girl Scouts, and I and my brother were younger brothers to girl scouts. If you didn’t grow up with Girl Scout big sisters, it’s hard to do justice to the inexorable pressure you felt to do things the Girl Scout Way.
Back in the day there was actually a Girl Scout merit badge for making your little brother do things. Here is the actual badge, shown for scale next to the Washing Dishes merit badge.
Younger Scouts might be excused for not knowing about the Bossing Your Younger Brother merit badge, because its name was changed sometime in the late 60’s with the reemergence of feminist activism, to a more ambitious name like “Leadership” or something like that. I’m pretty sure all three of my sisters earned the BYYB badge.
When I was a bit older, I remember trying dishwashing as a pick-up line. We were in some sort of pseudo-domestic setting that young adults sometimes find themselves in, perhaps actually washing dishes, and I got into a debate with an attractive young woman about the proper temperature to do the rinsing. She espoused a good cold-water rinse; at the time, I was a hot-rinse man.
Nowadays, the debate would quickly devolve into an internet search, and indeed now there are treatises on that very subject available, such as this article. Apparently the whole thing is a trade-off between the mechanical force provided by the water (which is higher for COLD water) and its dissolving power (which is higher for HOT water).
But I had no access to such facts back then, and a good thing too, because if I had offered it I would have come off as a pompous know-it-all (which those of you who don’t know me might be willing to attest I am not).
Instead, I choose to believe that what I actually argued was, “Yes, I think you might be right. You are very insightful.” Whatever I said, it clearly didn’t work, because I never saw this young woman again.
Let me close with the subject of not washing the dishes. There are three instances where washing dishes are not advised:
(1) I heard somewhere, probably an old Columbo episode, that when you are making fine aged whiskey, you don’t want to wash out the barrels in between use. I don’t know if that’s really true, and frankly I don’t want to risk finding out it’s not true, so I’m not looking it up.
(2) There are cultures where the keeping and using of dirty dishes is considered a sign of manliness. Witness the following scene in a rowdy Klondike bar, from an averagely-funny example of the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby “Road” movies, The Road to Utopia (1946):
(3) There’s only one instance I know about from my own experience. But I really know it—it was pounded into me every day for the twenty years that I spent working for the Navy. Thou shalt NOT wash thy coffee cup!
I worked for many years at Navy R&D labs, and every day I fortified myself with a several cups of strong, thick Navy coffee, and I never washed my mug, if I knew what was good for me. The only maintenance that mug got was that every few years, when its holding capacity got measurably lower, I would send it over to the machine shop to be re-bored. I’m not making this up: here’s a whole thought-piece on the subject.
That’s it! Thanks for reading. Stay well!
Dorn
3/13/2020
My sister Tara (who, being younger than me, earned her BYYB merit badge on our brother Roal) asked me where I get my ideas for posts. I don’t always know, but sometimes I think of a title first, and then try to figure out if I can write a post around it.
I didn’t do that in this case. I had started writing the post, and had a working title (“Lemonade—in a dirty glass!”). Then Kathleen contributed the title sentence, while she was describing the effect that eating a cup of caramel swirl ice cream late the night before had on her insomnia.
“I slept on ice cream last night” is just objectively a better title than my original in every way but one. (That one way being, of course, that it bears no relation to the content of the piece.)
I have a list of other possible titles, including some that seem really good but I can’t think of any appropriate content, so be warned this could happen again.
-d