Adulthood December 7, 2007

I always bring something to read with me when I’m smoking. Be it a romance novel (firtst choice always :)) magazine, newspaper, Reader’s Digest or whatever happens to be lying around the house or on the dinner table. The book that I grabbed yesterday was Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul; the first one. Because there’s a part 2 already then there’s the journal and I think a 3rd already, not sure on that anymore. Anyway, I was just flipping through the pages and came upon this article that I really liked. It’s so real and it didn’t sugarcoat anything and it’s funny too. I tried finding the article online so that I can just copy it here but I can’t find it (or maybe my research skills are not working). So, I’ll just type it manually here - that’s how much I like it.

Adulthood
by Robert Fulghum

After the dishes are washed and the sink rinsed out, there are remains in the strainer at the bottom of the sink what I will call, momentarily, some “stuff”. A rational, intelligent, objective person would say this is simply a mixture of bits of protein, carbohydrates, fat and fiber. Dinner dandruff.

Furthermore, the person might add that not only was that material first sterilized by the high heat of cooking, but further sanitized by going through the detergent and hot water of the dishpan, and rinsed. No problem.

But any teenager who has been dragooned into washing dishes knows this explanation as a lie. That stuff in the bottom of the strainer is toxic waste — deadly poison — a danger to health. In other words, about as icky as icky gets.

One of the very few reasons I had any respect for my mother when I was 13 was because she would reach into the sink with her bare hands - BARE HANDS - and pick up that lethal gunk and drop it into the garbage. To top that, I saw her reach into the wet garbage and fish around in there looking for a lost teaspoon BAREHANDED - a kind of mad courage. She found the spoon in a clump of coffee grounds mixed with scrambled egg remains and the end of the vegetable soup. I almost passed out when she handed it to me to rinse off. No teenager who wanted to live would have touched that without being armed with gloves, a face mask and stainless-steel tongs.

Once, in school, I came across the French word ordure, and when the teacher told me it meant “unspeakable filth” I knew exactly to what it referred. We had it every night. In the bottom of the sink.

When I reported my new word to my mother at dish washing time, she gave me her my-son-the-idiot look and explained that the dinner I had just eaten was in just about the same condition in my stomach at the moment, rotting, and it hadn’t even been washed and rinsed before it went down my drain. If she had given me a choice between that news and being hit across the head with a two-by-four, I would have gone for the board.

I lobbied long and hard for a disposal and automatic dishwasher, knowing full well that they had been invented so that nobody would ever have to touch the gunk again.

Never mind what any parent or objective adult might tell me, I knew the stuff in the sink drainer was lethal and septic. It would give you leprosy, or something worse. If you should accidentally touch it, you must never touch any other part of your body with your finger until you had scalded and soaped and rinsed your hands. Even worse, I knew that the stuff could congeal and mush up and mutate into some living thing that would crawl out of the sink during the night and get loose in the house.

Why not just use rubber gloves, you ask? Oh, come on. Rubber gloves are for sissies. Besides, my mother used her bare hands, remember. My father never came closer than three feet to the sink in his life. My mother said he was lazy. But I knew that he knew what I knew about the gunk.

Once, after dinner, I said to him that I bet Jesus never had to wash dishes and clean the gunk out of the sink. He agreed. It was the only theological discussion we ever had.

My father, however, would take a plunger to the toilet when it was stopped up with even more worse stuff. I wouldn’t even go in the room when he did it. I didn’t want to know.

But now. Now, I am a grown-up. And have been for some time. And I imagine making a speech to a high school graduating class. First, I would ask them, “How many of you would like to be an adult, an independent, on-your-own citizen?” All would raise their hands with some enthusiasm. And then I would give them a list of things that grown-ups do.

• clean the sink strainer
• plunge out the toilet
• clean up babies when they poop and pee
• wipe runny noses
• clean up the floor when the baby throws strained spinach
• clean ovens and grease traps and roasting pans
• empty the kitty box and scrape up the dog doo
• carry out the garbage
• pump out the bilges
• bury dead pets when they get run over in the street

I’d tell the graduates that when they can do these things, they will be adults. Some of the students might not want to go on at this point. But they may as well face the truth.

It can get even worse that the list suggests. My wife is a doctor, and I won’t tell you what she tells me she has to do sometimes. I wish I didn’t know. I feel ill at ease sometimes being around someone who does those things. And also proud.

A willingness to do your share of cleaning up the mess is a test. And taking out the garbage of this life is a condition of membership in a community.

When you are a kid, you feel that if they really loved you, they wouldn’t ever ask you to take out the garbage. When you join the ranks of the grown-ups, you take out the garbage because you love them. And by “them” I mean not only your own family, but the family of mankind.

The old cliche holds firm and true.

Being an adult is dirty work.

But someone has to do it.