A washing machine, a wedding dress, a slice of real life

One thing about being old is not being young enough to be fresh out of school, newly wed, broke, with no car and making weekly trips to visit a coin-operated laundromat.

This is what I was thinking the other day as my wife and I sat waiting for a couple of heavy-duty machines to clean, rinse and spin our throw rugs. We have a perfectly good washing machine and dryer, but the laundromat’s heavy-duty coin gobblers do a better job with things like rugs.

We put two rugs in each machine. In less than 30 minutes they got clean and were ready to spend the night on a drying rack in the garage.

But that’s not the norm for laundromats — at least not the one we occasionally visit.

What we see when we go to the laundromat is a slice of real life, folks struggling to make ends meet and trying to stretch every penny’s worth from every quarter they push into a slot.

My wife reads a book while waiting. Not me. I’m absolutely fascinated by the laundry habits of my fellow humans.

Here is something I noticed right away when we were at the laundromat the other day:

Folks of average or above-average intelligence were stuffing as many items as possible into one washer. I mean stuffing — pushing in wads of shirts and pants and underwear and blouses and socks and on and on.

Whatever happened to separating your laundry? You know, whites in one pile, colors in another, delicates in another, and so on.

Not only that, after the stuffed washer got going, the owner of the clothes poured bleach into the machine’s dispenser. Is that a good thing?

As I watched the choreography of the laundromat unfold the other day, I was particularly taken by one young woman who was obviously an old pro in the laundry game. She had at least three washers going at once, all stuffed with as many items as would possibly fit. After the first machine’s last spin, she started pulling the contents into a large wire basket. Out came clothes to be worn, pillows, sheets, a wedding dress (beautiful!) a lacy tablecloth, a couple of rugs (I started feeling a little guilty) and every other washable item you can imagine.

She held up the wedding dress and announced to all her laundromat kin that she might never wear it again, but she liked to take it out once in a while and look at it. Just look. And remember.

The wedding dress, by the way, looked perfectly fine for all its tumbling and spinning in the laundromat washer. It was headed for a quarter-hungry dryer. We were gone before the wedding dress made its last public appearance.

When my wife and I were first married, we toted our weekly laundry (no wedding dresses) more than half a mile to the nearest coin-operated laundromat. While three or four machines hummed after swallowing our quarters, we would play cards. Occasionally we carried wet laundry home, particularly sheets, to hang on the clothesline strung up in the yard behind the house whose attic apartment we occupied.

One of the most compelling reasons for getting our first used car was so we wouldn’t have to walk to and from the laundromat. When we eventually got our first washer and dryer (after eight moves in four states) we thought we had conquered the good life.

I’m glad we don’t have to make regular trips to a laundromat anymore. I wish the woman with the wedding dress many years of happiness. I hope she, too, will have a washer and dryer of her own. Someday.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.