I don’t mind doing the laundry. In fact, I’d rather do it than have it done by someone else. No one seems to feel quite this way. But I think there’s something nice about removing your freshly cleaned clothes immediately from the dryer. My adult life has never included my own private laundry room. I prepare for the laundromat with a book, paper and pen or CD. It’s a good time to sit and be productive.
The feel of the laundromat is never the same. It depends on the people already there and those coming in. People are as varied as their laundry containers. For instance, I arrive with about four bagfuls of clothes. and four clean bags. Gym bags are popular, as are special laundry containers, carts, even homemade cloth bags. Many of the young single guys come in looking as if they just rolled out of bed. Actually, that can be said about many young single woman, too. Some singles stay and wait; some don’t. I noticed that older men are effcient; they stay and read the newspaper. They’re very casual and almost invisible in the way they move about. Older women are sometimes fussy and too anxious to wait around. When older couples wash the woman attends to everything; the man tries in an awkward way to be helpful. They don’t stay.
Some people come in dragging their big bundles of laundry on the ground behind them, then plop them into the cart that is used to carry clothes from the washer to the dryer. Why do they do that? Why? Why?
Some people jam all their washed clothes into their gym bag, zip it and they’re gone. I had to do that once. It was all a heaping pile of wrinkles by the time I got to fold it.
Laundry day – it’s cheap entertainment.
When Kahlil Gibran wrote: “I want to be alive to all the life that is in me now, to know each moment to its uttermost.” Do you think that includes time spent in a laundromat?
