IT is never my duty to do some cleaning in our home. My age has exempted me from that, and my niece and nephew cannot bear, it seems to see me, at the kitchen doing nothing.
Lately, I realized I could be stubborn. This means that whenever any younger member of the household tries to stop me from doing household chores, I can stand my ground and insist I should be allowed certain tasks.
It is during these times that I declare myself the dishwasher of the day.
There is, however, a reason why I insist on washing dishes, and this is the fact that I can, within that act, concentrate fully on life and its vicissitudes. To describe “concentration” is an abuse of an observer’s authority; in other words, I do not have the monopoly of paying attention to the details of an object, a phenomenon. But I know I have forged a silent pact with the world around me, allowing me to look deeply at this world as it turns.
Everything did not begin with washing dishes. Long before I had convinced myself that washing dishes could bring about enlightenment, I already had that epiphany.
It was a day after two-eye operations were completed, and my vision had reached a level that could only be described as “scintillating.” That word is related to “scintilla,” which means “a spark.” I could sense my two eyes were emitting a glare that was not blurring my vision but rather showing lights that clarified objects—trees, clouds, roofs of distant building.
I was looking at the world differently and this difference was not marked by the binaries of seeing and not seeing, but rather by the polarity of losing the dimensions of depth and distance and recovering surroundings where streets had depth once more, where clouds were stupendous gradations and houses whose roofs had declared colors of dark red, mauve, brown, with beams indicating lines forming squares, rectangles and triangles, conjuring an order, a symmetry or, in the lack of it, asymmetry.
Then, I spent hours looking at the sky not for philosophy but for an assurance that my eyes were able to withstand the rigors of distance, and that I could stare at the cirrus and the nimbus and find whites and grays.
Then the virus came. Cooped at home, I soon discover the magic of shared household. Other than writing there is nothing else that follows my personal qualification profile. I cannot cook. I do not know how to repair a car or air-conditioner. I also do not have the acumen to arrange the chaos in any of the rooms in the house. But I can wash dishes.
Washing dishes can shower graces when plates and small plates, fork and spoon present themselves with the remains of the pork or chicken, or when bowls bear the angst of leftover lettuce, carrots, and onions.
Where do you begin?
The more systematic dishwashing person will tell you, first you need to apply the dishwashing liquid. Presently, I can appreciate the sincerity of diluting the said cleanser with water. We use a deep blue liquid for cleaning dishes. When diluted, the material should remain still within the saturation of blues—azure, periwinkle, ultramarine. When the material has approached cyan, which is akin to the greenish-blue sea over the shallow sea covering a whitish sandy beach, then the cleanser has become so thin it may not be able to remove the grease from, let’s say, a pasta.
Having achieved the right tone of the dishwashing liquid, I proceed to attend to sharp objects first, like knife. My phobia and trauma of having fingers sliced set aside, I go to the big plates. With the morsels removed from them, I wrap around the well of the plate going to its lip and rim, the underside the last part I attend to. Then I reverse the procedure, after which I rinse it immediately with water. I do not stack them one over the other.
The small plates follow, then the drinking glasses, the last I clean by turning it over with my four fingers clingy around its mouth. I raise each glass to inspect if something is stuck on its side.
Forks and spoons are the last to go through my ministration. At this point, I use the rougher side of the sponge to address the sins of matters obsessed with the root of the fork, going over its tine and terminating at its point. When I have time, I heat water and put the said water in a deep container, where I subject the utensils for deeper purification.
When all this is finished, I, like the Lord of Creation, look around. A new sponge makes me happy. Testing a new dishwashing liquid is a privilege. Then, when no one is looking, I go closer to where I am drying the plates etc. I do a re-view, a re-search. I run over my forefinger tenderly and without malice over utensils I pick at random. I bring them closer to my nose, and smell a bowl, or a plastic container. No vestigial oil and spice can escape my olfactory skills nurtured by years of sniffing vetiver and eau fraiche or “fresh water.”
I am content. The 45 minutes of accomplishing my duty has brought me closer to eternity, that moment when your soul is thinking only of one thing, which in this case, is to clean dishes and utensils. For an hour or more, I am there, satisfied with myself and nothing will make me feel depressed—not the thought of a dear friend having been intubated, or that a good art professor has passed away, or that in distant villages live old men and women going hungry and children growing up and growing old not knowing they have a government that has the moral duty to take care of them.
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