Celebs and Washing Dishes as Atonement -- and Auntie

Lifted the following from Garrison Keillor's latest column in Salon:

"People decry Paris Hilton but she serves a purpose. We're a big country and we have so little in common anymore. Television and pop music have splintered into hundreds of niches. There are no singers like Satchmo or Sinatra or Elvis whose voices everyone knows. The audience for even the most successful TV show is a small minority. Most famous persons in America are persons most Americans have never heard of.

"But if we don't admire the same people, at least we can find people to despise. That is the role of ditzy pop stars and rich bimbos and the old tycoons with comb-overs and the home-run kings on steroids -- they are the village lunatics in our ongoing national fairy tale. We check on their comings and goings and then we turn to our work with fresh appreciation. Maybe your feuds aren't widely reported and maybe people aren't mobbing the celeb sites looking for pictures of you without underwear, but you have work and that's a consolation, just being good at accomplishing useful things.

"I, for example, am good at washing dishes. I used to do it professionally and it's still satisfying. You clear away the wreckage and run a sink full of soapy water and make everything sparkly clean again, and you look around the kitchen and get a feeling that money can't buy. Keep your nose clean and make yourself useful. That's my advice."

I became fairly good at washing dishes, at least at home in the last few years. I used to do it professionally too, just once, way back when I was at Cragmont College (that idyllic institution with its beautiful view from above the Ohio River). I was not good at it then, I regret to say. (Damn! I have so damn many regrets!)

My problem was, as it was for so many years, one of insanity -- doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I got in trouble on that job because I wasn't thorough. I had the obsession that the job was trivial and therefore should be done with as quickly as possible. So I tried to get it over with fast and be on my way to chemistry lab. That didn't work.

The problem was that I wasn't fast, never have been, and I couldn't be thorough when I tried to be fast. Thorough and fast are mutually exclusive in my case. If you need a job done fast, don't hire me. The extra time it takes me is necessary. But I tried over and over to take shortcuts. You can't take shortcuts in washing dishes, especially dishes on which the old-time cooking of Mrs. Hayes reposed (she used bacon grease as liberally as my mother did) and a case of the trots for fellow students was in the balance.

I shall carry my failures, all of them, to the grave. No exceptions. Crappily executed jobs as a breadwinner for my family and as a social servant to the community, not just as a jackoff college kid; shameful antics when I was drinking; failure as a husband and father; my botched dishwashing job. No exceptions.

But I have tried to make some amends, and once in a while I do all right and I can live with myself as a sadder and wiser man who says to himself, Why in hell didn't I do it this way all along? But sometimes I feel a little brighter in at last doing the right thing. I feel that way now about doing the dishes.

I take my time. At least I have corrected my old strategy of "Ready, fire ... aim." I take a square Rubbermaid dishpan which fits perfectly in the square stainless steel sink, run hot water in the pan, add a jigger of Dawn, scrape everything thoroughly, and I then wash and rinse each and every item -- thoroughly. Then I wipe off the counters and the table and the stove.

My mate, who is as hygienic as "a nurse -- and a good one" can be, does not really like to wash dishes, I believe, and I try to spring her from that duty as often as I can. And the job I do pleases her -- and me.

I had -- (have, because nobody you love dies until you do) -- an aunt who was the counterpart of "Aunt Sister" in the memoirs of Russell Baker, i.e. the family "character." She had a generic name, too, "Auntie." She was unique: you can tell that from the family photos: in a crowd of depressives, surly with eyes downcast, she is always the one who has her chin up, smiling just as if this world were a pretty decent place to be after all.

I bring her up now because she (unlike her sister)liked to do dishes and do them properly. Just before she died she told me where and how she learned the proper task -- and pleasure -- of washing dishes. She was a little girl in an orphan's home in Cleveland, and she took pleasure from KP there. I still remember the excitement of going to visit Auntie on the outskirts of Nap Town: there she'd be, immersed in all the worldly pleasures (playing cards, a Camel in the corner of her mouth, working a stick of Juicy Fruit and drinking a brew as well) but delighted to greet you, startlingly loud and joyous. I hope to hear her greeting me once again after St. Pete lets me through the golden gate: "HI THERE YA OL' SHIT POT!"