I opened my eyes wide with shock and said, ‘Dusting?’
My wife barked at me that just because I grew up on top of the town dump didn’t mean I should afflict her life with my beastly habits. Limber up the damn duster and get at it!
But that’s not what I meant when I responded so doubtfully.
What I meant to imply was that if you are asking your husband to dust, it is like asking your son to go fetch the ‘Sky Hook’. It seems a form of hazing, a mild cruelty, to heap scorn upon him, to show him and reassure yourself that he is a big shiftless lummox. It seems too much like, ‘I worked all day and you couldn’t even put on the dishwasher?’
And believe me, I am not some checked-shirt, magazine Dad with a thousand power tools and an abiding interest in fishing, whose culinary skills topped out at smearing peanut butter on a heel of white bread. I am a very modern man, happy as a clam in the kitchen, or changing diapers. I can discuss fashion a little, Art a lot, or appreciate a fine fabric as well as my female pals, of whom I have many.
But I realized that I honestly have never dusted. I have also never churned butter or shod a horse. I have bought at least 6 vacuum cleaners in my life – and every one of them gets a thorough workout with the attachment brush and the provocatively named ‘crevice tool’, sucking up yuck off the furniture. But I’ve never even owned a duster.
To me the ‘dusting’ concept is theatrical, sort of like a cartoon Maitre D’ wearing tails with a tea towel hanging over his forearm, or being announced at an event with trumpets. What can a Swiffer do that a $1000 Hoover can’t?
The duster is the Carriage Lamp of housecleaning tools
The duster is the Carriage Lamp of housecleaning tools. Carriage extinct long ago, lamp preserved as an antique on the mantelpiece. Oh sure, you could light it up in a power failure but I never quite got around to rendering hog fat into tallow, what with all the Netflix.
People may some day find a new use for dusters, maybe as the dismal topper of reviled civil war monuments, or an ornament taped to car antennae during the playoffs. Maybe you’ll see them on Stephen Colbert. “No, Jon, it’s not a sex toy…Housewives once used these to smear exfoliated skin cels into a strata of even thickness on their coffee tables.” Gasp. “No, this is true, audience! After having a long pull on their lukewarm cup of Cholera water, they would ‘DUST’…”
VRD
Dustbowl :: Credit: NOAA George E. Marsh Album [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Vince R Ditrich © 2017 :: Random Note Generator :: All Rights Reserved
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