On Towels

You should never air your dirty laundry in public. However, what if the laundry is clean? Does that change the sentiment? Does it become, you should always air your clean laundry in public? Probably not.

Towel

A towel is generally used for drying off after a shower. It can also be called Mr. Towel, given a somewhat gravelly voice and be used to coax toddlers out of baths. Sometimes your toddler will say that Mr. Towel is sad, and you will be obliged to drop him to the floor. Sometimes your toddler will start shaking because s/he is so excited to be wrapped in the loving embrace of Mr. Towel. Sometimes a towel is just a towel though.

Sometimes you can use a towel to wipe up the floor of your basement after another flood. In that case a towel is not something to dry you off, but something to dry the floor off. Towels can also feel like saviors if this happens to you often. The towel may get somewhat dirtier in this process but it is possible to assume that the towel is more the Platonic ideal of a towel when it is sopping wet. Or is the Platonic ideal of a towel a dry towel just fresh from the laundry? This is a question about usefulness, never a good question for someone writing to ask.

A towel can also be stuffed underneath a door to try and dissuade flood waters from rising too high. In this case the towel, bunched up, is probably not serving at its Platonic best. However, the towel has acquired a new use. Your towel is now a night watchman, a sentry, an extremely quiet alarm system that almost warns you when someone enters, like maybe they trip a little bit or something before riffling through your underwear drawer.

Sometimes a towel is a small and perpetually high cartoon character escaped from the Defense Department. This is not the conventional understanding of the role that a towel plays.

Sometimes a towel is simultaneously a tool for drying and a symbol. The towel would be said to be serving dual functions. I mentioned to Sadie, after she got out of the bath that the hair dryer could serve the dual function of warming her and drying her hair. She found the term, dual function, hilarious, and spent the next few minutes saying to herself and chuckling.

I do not do the laundry. I have done laundry in the past. And I will do laundry in the future. But if you were making a graph of how often I do the laundry, and why would you be wasting your time on such a thing, go read a book or something, it would show that I basically don't do the laundry. I am adept at moving it over. I have always been fine doing the laundry infrequently. During college I routinely washed the sheets at the end of each semester, towels received the same treatment. This is to say, I would not care if the lines were ever done. It is one of my many failings.

S does the laundry. Not always, but yeah, she does the laundry. And, every time she washes the linens she removes the towels from the racks and doesn't replace them with new towels. I arise in the morning, worn out as you understand dear reader, and walk straight into the bathroom, start the shower and commence wiping sleep from my eyes. When my shower has concluded, on the day the linens have been done, I always stare out for a moment at the empty rack, cold and wet, wondering why there are no new towels on the rack.

One argument stats that I could put towels on the rack myself, participate more in the laundry process. I could also always check the towel rack before getting into the shower to insure that I can remedy the situation whilst dry. These propositions all seem unreasonable to me. Why can't she just replace the linens? Of course, she's wondering why I can't do the laundry. Why I can't just check the towel rack. She's wondering why, when I finally do put new towels on the rack, I only get one, as if I am the only person who needs a fresh towel, when, in fact, there are three of us in need of new towels or Mr. Towels as the case may be.

A towel is a strange thing, because certain mornings its presence or its absence can make you wonder how anyone keeps it together, how two people who have such fundamentally different ideas about linens and the intense discomfort of wet feet on a solid floor can make anything work. And then you'll walk down the hallway and open a door, a small voice will say, "I'm playing with Linda," and show you a small teddy bear, and you'll think that perhaps some of the things you've done together have worked.