Please Excuse Our Dust

I have to start this by stating straight out that my husband is the best.  He has never uttered one word of criticism about me.  He loves me endlessly.  He tells me I am beautiful, no matter how ridiculous my hair might be in the morning after a restless night, or what have you.  Of course, he has the advantage of remembering me when I was a sixteen-year-old girl, which, I'm sure, helps.  Because that girl is long gone.

Mark is a muscular guy who chose a profession in which he cares for helpless people and saves their lives.  He is a hero.  He doesn't see himself as such, and his true humility is one of the best parts of him.  His hands are the strongest man hands I have ever seen, but. . .Mark is also a little boy.

I am possibly the only person who sees that side of him, and I love that little boy.  In fact, I wish that when he had been a little boy growing up in a large, chaotic family, I could have picked him up and rocked him and sung to him and told him how special he was.  Because it seems no one did that for him enough.

I love the man, Mark, and I love the little boy, Mark, who is cute, and also, at times, funny.  To me, they are not really two sides of the same coin, but one and the same.  I'll give you an example.

The man, Mark, wants to do all he can to help me and protect me.  To him, it's his duty.  Of course I need a little help from time to time, but I am no damsel in distress.  I've been a superwoman working mother, single-handedly raising kids and managing a household for years at a time, twice.  This week, with Mark's help and the help of one of my sons who was handy at the time, I put on a birthday party for my youngest child, who turned eighteen.  (There are a lot of feelings about that that I may or may not share in a later post.)  But one of the things I do for a birthday in the family is put on a "birthday dinner," similar to what my mother used to do for us.

The birthday person chooses the menu for the dinner and the type of birthday cake and ice cream s/he wants, and I cook.  (I do buy the ice cream, but I usually cook everything else.)  I set the table in what I call our dining alcove (half the size of the splendid dining room in my previous house) with a table cloth, cloth napkins, and my seldom-used china.  I try to make it a little more special than our everyday dinners.

I learned today that, while helping clean up after the dinner, Mark protected me from what he must have thought of as extra work by putting some of the cloth napkins back in the drawer instead of putting them in the laundry.

I mean, it's a lot of work to toss three or four cloth napkins into the washer along with everything else.

As is my custom on Friday nights after my work week wraps up, I sorted and stain-sticked the laundry last night and started the nine loads I usually do.  I had to give priority to the work clothes that a son needed washed by morning, so I didn't follow my usual pattern.

This morning, as I folded the load of "lights," there were only three napkins.  I had set seven places.  Now, one of the people I expected had not come, so I could understand putting that napkin back.  Here is the list of the extra work that "saving me work" produced.

1. I noticed four napkins were missing.

2. I puzzled my head about that.

3. I looked for the lost napkins on the chairs in the dining room, and in the other loads, and in the laundry room.

4. I thought about where they might be.

5. I found them in the drawer when I went to put the tablecloth and three napkins back in there.

6. I noticed that one of them had visible food on it, and took that in.

7. I removed the four napkins from the drawer. There was no telling, now, which one had been at the empty place.

8. I stain-sticked the one with food on it.

9. I took a picture of it, because my mean streak told me to, and I was finding this funny.

10. I put the four cloth napkins in with another load.

Despite my husband having been married to his ex-wives and then me nearly the entire span of his adult life, he is still kind of a bachelor in the way he thinks.  It didn't occur to him that someone might have wiped his mouth, or nose, on a napkin.  Or that it might have dropped on the floor.  They were probably all handled or, at least, breathed on.

Any virus germs on them as they sat in the drawer for a week until they would be needed again would likely have died, but any bacteria germs on them would possibly have grown colonies.  And the likelihood of them finding the same owner the second time around is practically nil.

Maybe my Germ Tolerance Level is lower than many people's.  It's certainly lower now than it used to be.  (For reference, see the year 2020.)  Even without that, when I get what I assume is a clean, laundered napkin out of the drawer to place on my table, I expect it to be as clean as a washing machine can get it.  I certainly don't want to think about where it's been before. I certainly don't expect to be getting dirty, used napkins out of my sideboard drawer and placing them on my table for unsuspecting guests' use.  

So I have been smiling to myself and shaking my head a little bit today.  I have been weighing out how to raise this, gently, as a for-future-reference teaching moment that will not pierce a little boy-who-was-only-hoping-to-help-me's heart.  (Oh--tasks eleven and twelve!)  His being a little boy is cute.  And funny.  And I will definitely give that big man a hug.

(Mark approved this message, pointing out that we are all "under construction," so "please excuse our dust.")