Doing Dishes and Deja Vu

Well, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I am always surprised and occasionally amazed at the things that trigger memories to come rushing up from the depths they inhabit in our minds. Case in point: today I am doing a load of dishes (you can save the jokes about pigs flying, a cold day in hell, etc, etc... I've heard them all, and I get it... me washing dishes is a lot more rare than it should be). OK... so I'm doing a load of dishes, and I open the cabinet to get a new SOS pad. As I open the top of the yellow box, I am blasted with the odor of the soap pads contained within.

I've been told that scent is the sense that is most closely hard-wired to memory, and based on my experience, I would have to agree. For, when that soapy aroma hit my nose, it triggered some involuntary neural response, and I'm suddenly remembering some holiday (most likely Thanksgiving or Easter), in Grandma's and Grandpa's kitchen in West Babylon, and we're cleaning up from dinner. On this particular occassion, I'm standing at the sink on wash duty (again, no need for the lightning striking twice jokes... yes I was doing dishes, and yes, it is rare). Grandpa is standing to my right carving up the remains of the holiday roast, I believe to put into Duke's dish, which will provide some context of time for my family, because Dukey has been gone for quite a while now.

Anyway, I'm about to start washing dishes in the sink. However, I grew up in a house with an electric dishwasher, and have next to no concept of what I'm doing... seems simple enough... run dish under water, rub with soapy steel wool, rinse off, pass to person on drying duty (who I believe on this day was my Aunt Joanne). Except that I didn't realize that your not supposed to keep the water running the whole time. Well, Grandpa, who always had his own quirky "right" ways of doing things, watched me wash all the dishes while he carved the remnants of the roast, and when I was finished, in a manner that anyone who knew Grandpa would recognize instantly as his personal flourish, he made a real dramatic display of looking out the window over the sink.

"What are you looking, at Grandpa?"

"I'm looking at the pool."

"Why... what's going on?"

And, as always, his punchline:

"Well, you used so much water washing the dishes, I thought maybe the pool would be empty by now."

And all of this from the smell of an SOS soapy steel wool pad.