The Dirty Dishes

the mid-month post

Let’s take the most unglamourous thing about our lives—for me it’s doing the dishes—and take another look at it. To be clear, it won’t get any more glamorous. Not at all. It will stay exactly as unspectacular, as low-key annoying or grubby or dull, as it is. That’s the cool thing. We’re not looking again to suddenly see it differently. We’re looking again to see it as it is.

This boring thing? This mountain of dishes? This cup? This spoon? This soapy sponge? This window above the sink that looks out on a fire escape and a concrete wall across an alley? This is mine. My dishes, my cup, my spoon, my sponge, my window. Since I’m a person who draws pictures, I might draw a picture of them—in fact, I’ve drawn quite a few. But if I were not an artist, if I were not making art from them, I would still be making my life from them. And that is also a big deal.

I am right here, right now. And that is remarkably precious. The harder I look, the more likely I am to realize that I actually exist in this present moment. And, I hate to tell you, but I’m pretty sure that’s mindfulness.

When I was young, growing up in the first generation of kids whose parents got divorced at the fifty-percent rate that’s been prevalent ever since, I was convinced my generation wouldn’t get married. I figured we’d have seen our parents’ or our friends’ parents’ marriages fall apart and decide it was too risky. I thought big white dresses and bridesmaids and cakes and all of that was the last thing we’d all want. It turned out, of course, I was completely wrong. Marriage as an institution and weddings, both as an industry and a really fun and meaningful thing to do, turned out to be a lot more durable than I’d anticipated.

What I’d pictured was that, if Gen-X-er’s did want to commit, we’d just stand by the kitchen sink one morning (why the kitchen sink, I’m not sure—maybe because it was the most unromantic part of the house I could think of) and make some promises to one another there in private. What I didn’t yet understand was that like three-quarters of the point of a wedding is doing it in front of other people. So much of the magic, I found when I did it myself, was in the willingness to say those words with everyone you love as witnesses.

But while alone at the kitchen sink is for the most part a terrible place to marry another person, it’s a great place to marry yourself. To come back to first principles. To ground yourself back into your eyes and your ears and the hot water pouring over your hands. You are here. You are not someplace else. What do you see? 

The first time I ever went to New York was a surprise first-anniversary trip from Bill. We were celebrating not only one year of marriage, but also the end of his first year of teaching, which was such a relief as to be almost euphoric. But although I had a truly excellent time, I was disappointed by how New York looked.

I’d been led astray by the movies (mostly by the movies of Nora Ephron) into thinking it would be beautiful. Now, ok, actually, New York can be beautiful, as I discovered on subsequent visits. I’ll put the autumn sunlight coming through the tress in Central Park up against just about any other sight on earth for beauty. But you have to learn to find the beauty there. A lot of New York is super unglamorous and that felt like mostly what I saw that first trip. Grubby little storefronts. Bags of trash on the sidewalk. Endless scaffolding.

I experienced actual disappointment that weekend upon realizing that New York doesn’t really look much of anything like You’ve Got Mail. But over time I came to love the fact that it doesn’t. Because the memories of that trip are cemented in the actual concrete weirdness of the actual New York:

Our hotel that was in the midst of a renovation so we had this extremely luxe room that was reached by a literal freight elevator. The first night when we got caught in a really heavy rain and ran through dark slick streets from the subway to a French restaurant with our jackets over our heads laughing manically. Foolishly taking our first-ever New York cab to our first-ever Broadway show and getting stuck in traffic in horrible Times Square and almost being late and stressing out but then the show being amazing.

Sometimes I Instagram my dirty dishes. Partly for the same reason that I’m writing about them, or that I draw them. They catch my eye. I see them. I want to do something with that seeing. Take it onward. Express it. But also, if we’re being honest, as sort of a middle-fingers-up to the algorithm, or to the idea that we’re all supposed to be curating and performing perfection on there all the time.

And it feels a little like the New York thing. There’s the movie version of New York, and there’s actual New York. And as much as I might enjoy watching a movie set in Nora Ephron’s New York, I’m going to end up taking my vacation in the actual city of New York. And as much as we all enjoy spending time in the Instagram kitchens of Chrissy Teigen or Stanley Tucci, at the end of the day I wash the dishes in the actual kitchen of my actual home. I mean, we all know this. It’s not revelatory information. But the world is set up to make us be a little bit disappointed by the comparison, if we let it.

What I’m aiming for here is this:

I’m guessing maybe, when I revealed a few paragraphs back that I was disappointed with New York the first time I went, you might have been reflexively indignant on New York’s behalf. “What?! You can’t be disappointed with New York! It’s New York, for crying out loud! ‘The greatest city in the world!’ Are you daring to contradict Lin Manuel Miranda?”

And what I want, for you, is that same thing. What?! You can’t be disappointed in your kitchens! Your sinks! Your sponges! Your dirty dishes! They’re yours, for crying out loud! Your very own unglamourous, grubby, boring, day-to-day life. This is the life we get and it is a good life not in spite of the fact that it has mundane crap in it but because it has mundane crap in it.

If you took all the humdrum storefronts out of a city you wouldn’t have much of a city.   

If you took all the people out of a wedding you wouldn’t have much of a wedding. 

If you took all the dishes out of a home you wouldn’t have much of a home.

The boring is what holds us together. The boring is what holds us down. The boring is what witnesses our triumphs. The boring is what we see when we look. There is a spirit moving through us, waiting to connect our lives to this world. Waiting to anchor us and waiting to break free.

“The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in darkness, could we but see.  And to see, we have only to look. I beseech you to look!”