Laundry day
It’s not a metaphor for anything. Today I took laundry to the laundromat (the laundry-o-matic, except it’s anything but automatic) and tried to decide whether Tuesday night was a good night to be there.
The best part about Tuesday night was that there were few people there. However, because few people were there, the place was closing off sections so that the cleaning could get done.
I washed my laundry with headphones on. Frank McCourt spoke in my ear, and the story he told was ‘Tis, which is the book about his re-immigration to America. I was way behind on listening to the book because the book is depressing. When he got to the parts about his teaching (the precursor to his book Teacher Man) I was both fascinated and disgusted with myself. The last thing I wanted to hear about were the terrors of someone else’s first times teaching. And yet, his voice was so strong it’s hard not to listen.
In the half-empty laundromat, my body compromised between horror and fascination and decided to fall asleep, and I know I’d fallen asleep because the time on my cell phone had moved, and the time on the dryers was ten minutes later, and there were ten minutes I didn’t know nothing about on ‘Tis. Before I fell asleep, Frank McCourt was describing his difficult time in his relationship. When I woke up, his mother was coming to America.
As I slept, the manager of the place had gone around collecting the quarters from the machinery. She pushed a wheeled laundry basket with a cut open bottle of detergent. The bottle held all the quarters in the place. I was tempted to take a peek inside but my perch was too comfortable from my snooze for me to bother.
They had ringed the baskets around me.
It wasn’t my fault I fell asleep between two sections of the laundromat, but when I woke up the caretaker had lined up the baskets so that people couldn’t enter the room behind me. Of course I didn’t care, I was asleep, wasn’t I? But when I woke up, it frightened me to think that people had gotten that close to me without disturbing my rest.
felixnation :: Jan.23.2007 :: Odysseys, strangers :: No Comments »