Laundry Day
There was an astonishingly large hispanic family that was tying up the entire laundry room earlier tonight. The whole proccess was heavily imprinted by tradition. It was as if this family had been doing their laundry in that same room every other Sunday night for generations. Everything was worked out in detail, with large, plastic, wheeled trashcans waiting for the laundry to come out of the carefully masking-taped driers. The lids of the cans went to good use as well, being holding places for wet laundry that had yet to be assigned a cubbyhole in the large array of driers. Laundry was inexplicably shuffled from one washer or drier to another. A large pile of lint collected in the corner. Maybe part of the ritual would involve disposing of the pile, but I didn't stay for long. I sat in the room while waiting for a washing machine to become available. I read my book while the older members of the family made faces at the baby in the stroller or did mystical things with detergent and bleach. I even stayed in the room to wait for my laundry to be finished in the washing machine. I felt like a giant gringo monkey wrench hurled into the carefully planned hispanic clockwork. But that's not quite right. I certainly felt out of place and uncomfortable, but the machine stopped for no foreigner; it knew how to deal with me. The little toddler stared at me with that stare that only toddlers can use. You know the one. I'm inclined to describe it as an empty stare, but that is so unbelievably naive. That stare is more full than any stare an adult human could possibly dream of. It's full of the sheer purity of the essence of staring; it's a look full of seeing, and nothing else. It's a look empty of the knowledge that it is looking. I could babble on about that precious sight that vanishes around kindergarten, but you either know the look I'm talking about or you never will. I felt stupid, constantly checking the washing machine that I was leaning against to see if it was done. Surely, none of these laundry veterans would mistake the machine for being done just because it paused between cycles. They don't even need to feel the machine. They know. One of the young women/old girls met my eyes a couple times throughout my time there. She was quite beautiful, and I found myself thinking that if I were to live here for another year or so and if I were to start doing laundry on Sunday nights, that I might see her again and again. And maybe someday we'd actually talk to each other. And maybe I'd ask her out, and maybe we'd date, and have sex, and get married. But then again, maybe not. When I finally did get a drier, I didn't hang around for it to finish.