The humbling

or why I hate washing the dishes and still wouldn’t do without it

or why I hate washing the dishes and still wouldn’t do without it

pic by Marina Petrillo

The sink is so unashamedly analogic. It knows no smartphone, no click, no swipe or cancel. Either you have washed your dishes or you haven’t. You could have a dishwasher, mind you, and I am all for that. I was at one time known to my friends for wishing to erect a monument to the washing machine, that lifesaving, women-liberating invention — the tool of civilization I was more inclined to defend with my own life if ever the barbarians were to break at the door. But in my house, in every house I have lived in for that matter, there never was a dishwasher. No loading or unloading of shiny dry crystal glasses. No bending on the tray over the mysterious transformation from greasy to clean. Whatever squeaking sound I should extract from my clean plates, it would have to be obtained by my own hands.

I am such a stranger to the dishwasher that whenever I see one, I look on in awe — of both the machine and the user. My mom holds conversations as her automatic gestures work in and out of that humble servant of cleanliness.

I am, also, a messy person who has set systems to be clean and orderly her whole life. I surrendered to the evidence: a clean sink means a clean mind, ready for creation. A messy sink means a cluttered, worried mind. Plates and pans have a way of accumulating in the back of my conscience, a constant reminder of something not attended to, almost a relic of teenage laziness. Their grease is guilt, and getting rid of it the single most liberating gesture I can act in the house. If there is a problem that I cannot solve, I turn to the sink, half-hoping to find a forgotten coffee cup, an annoying egg-smelling plate from the morning. Because that I can solve, and I will invariably feel better afterwards.

An ancient song by Peter Gabriel.

“Sat in the corner of the Garden Grill, with plastic flowers on the window sill
No more miracles, loaves and fishes, been so busy with the washing of the dishes”

So brave of him to mold transcending songs in mundane details; so not what was expected of a man.

I happened to discuss the washing of the dishes with my friends, both men and women. We seem to agree that the satisfaction obtained by doing it is in proportion with the inertia of procrastinating that first kept us from doing it. In that respect, it feels a lot like the will we must command to direct ourselves to the gym or the swimming pool, dragging our feet at ungodly hours, and the guaranteed feeling of accomplishment we conquer once we’ve done it. Above all, both male and females seem to reach through the washing of the dishes a kind of suffering enlightment that was once known only to the slaving housewife: how can I engage myself in such a thing if I know for certain that very soon I will have to do it all over again?

Mind you, theoretically I hate washing the dishes. For what other reason the sink could often become too crowded, too late — the worst items clogging the quick innocent ones on the bottom, the grease becoming more and more discouraging with every spoon added to the pile? Or for what other reasons, not having a housewife life and struggling to find a half-hour even to read a book, I would be careful in choosing what to cook depending on how much dirty dishes it produces? As a civilised, too digital, fairly clothed and densely busy human being, there is nothing I wouldn’t do to avoid the washing of the dishes. The one thing that could push me to do it is if I have something much bigger to dodge and procrastinate. Nothing sends to me to the sink, say, as quickly as the thought of actually sitting down and write.

But oh the pleasure of the washing once I have overcome inertia and reached the tipping point! My hands immersed in the warm soapy water, the flow of cleaning and brushing and render back to shininess, the magic of transformation and tangible result.

The humbling.

According to the same law that cleans your mind in direct proportion with the cleanliness of your dish load, your mind starts to roam. It is now such a surefire experience that I consciously approach the annoying task as if it was a ritual. I hate approaching it but I trust it will bring meaning, and it invariably does. Most ideas came to me under the shower, like it happens to so many people, and while washing the dishes.

I have long been dreaming of a help in the house. Of returning home to ever-clean bedsheets and sparkly tiles and orderly piles of folded and pressed clothes. That would take a big load away from my busy life and free me from mundane chores, unloading them on to someone, by the way, who takes on other people’s mundane tasks for a living.

But fact is, I have this distinct suspicion that if I separated myself from my portion of mundane chores, I would be much less of a human. The wiping of a baby’s nose, the dealing with an animal’s feces, the sweating life of erotism, the walking instead of driving, the digging in the dirt to plant a seed — they’re the one connection to the analog animal that I am, and I don’t want to lose it. I am afraid to lose the connection I feel when sometimes, in one of those illuminations of the washing of the dishes, I clearly see that my gestures are repeating along the lines of millennia, since the very first woman or man scraped clean a flat stone in water and sand. The washing of the dishes is one of the few remaining vestiges of the bodily chore that sets the mind in motion, the faithful repeating despite knowing that soon it will have to be started all over again, an offering to the gods from the stubborn passing of a plow many of us (but not all of us) are no longer chained to.