A friend watched me soak the crusted pan that had been used to produce part of the dinner we had consumed. She noted that my soaking of the pan — designed to make cleaning easier — was behavior that she had not been able to “train” her male roommate to do.
Someone with whom I was involved once chided me on the way I made the bed. Considering that I had lived away from home since I was 18 years old, with many apartments, beds and bedding, I believed myself to be a seasoned bed-maker. However, I took the criticism in the spirit in which it was intended and then, launched a passive-aggressive strike: I never again made the bed.
When I go to visit my friend Nancy, I stay in the guest bedroom in the basement. Every day I am there, as soon as I arise, I make the bed, but when I leave, Nancy requests that I strip the bedding and place it into the washer. This apparently saves her a long trudge down the steps into the basement. (I also scrub the toilet, a task she has been very vocal about hating.) My first bride and I used to rise together on workday mornings, and we would immediately take sides of the mattress and make the bed together. I think of these actions not as the result of training, but demonstrations of appropriate socialization, and an acknowledgement that co-existence requires cooperation.
My eldest daughter taught me a valuable lesson about courtesy when she was about 6 years old. She had scampered — backward — into the powder room of our house, and immediately burst out, soaked. “MOM! Can you please tell Dad to put the top down?!” I never again left the top up on the toilet, and when my son was old enough, taught him to put “two tops up, two tops down.” (Of course, he was two, and liked the “bam-factor” in the two tops down part of the operation.)
My good friend is fond of noting that she considers the way in which I have maintained my various apartments, “messy.” I have a lot of stuff: books, binoculars, pencils, pens, paper, pictures (both printed and digital); ties, towels, t-shirts; shoes, suits and stacks of CDs and vinyl. I have 5 cue-balls, 5 pool sticks and 5 carrying cases, a bag of marbles and an unused deck of palmistry cards. I have six camera bags, eight cameras and a litter of lenses. I have more cups and glasses — some dating to the early 70s — than I will ever be able to use, and I am comfortable with all of it. My mother stayed with me for a few weeks when I was recovering from surgery and when she looked into my bulging linen closet, (the product of nearly 20 years of retail sample sales) she noted the careful way that the towels were folded and asked “Who’s the woman?” That statement proved to be ironic years later, when a woman in a self-serve laundry, watching me fold my towels, noted that, “Your mother taught you well.”
Observation and demonstration have been the great teachers of my life; I watched my mother iron my shirts when I was in high school, and I still iron them in the way that she did. She did not “train” me in the art of ironing, nor did she train me in the art of folding towels, washing dishes and making beds. When I wash, dust and clean, I do not do it because I have graduated from anyone’s domestic “training day.”
Those days are long over.