Powazek: Just a Thought: Washing the dirt away

Washing the dirt away
Just a thought from 9 August 2003 about Stories.

So I was washing shoes. Heather had expressed some concern. Are you allowed to wash sneakers at the laundromat?

"Of course you can," I said.

But the seed of doubt had been planted.

So when I was moving the sneakers from the washer to the dryer, I found myself doing it furtively. Avoiding eye contact. Rushing.

Just as I was putting the last shoe into the dryer, the man next to me said, "excuse me."

I played deaf.

"Excuse me? Sir?" he said louder.

I turned to face him. "Yes?" I said, a defensive tone creeping through.

"I'm done with this dryer and there's 10 minutes left on it," he said, motioning to a dryer next to him.

It took a moment for it to sink in.

"Oh," I said. "Oh! How nice! Thank you!"

I smiled and moved my shoes to his dryer, hit the LOW TEMP button, and thanked him again.

After a week of bad days, in a world where there's so much random hostility from all sides, it was nice to be reminded that strangers can intermittently kind as well.

Wha?
This section is called Just a Thought. It's a blog where I post little pieces of what I'm thinking about at the moment. This page is an individual entry called “Washing the dirt away” that I wrote on 9 August 2003.

Before this, I wrote a little something called “Ha ha ha” on 8 August 2003. After this, I wrote “Curmudgeon in-chief” on 14 August 2003.

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