"Best that you can do..." Hobson: Yes. Bathing is a very lonely business.
Arthur: Except...for fish.

If you don't know the above quote, it's ok. It comes from Arthur, an old comedy staring Dudley Moore. There is a good chance that my family is the only family in America that quotes this movie. Over and over again. At the dinner table, in the car, at the supermarket, on vacations, around the Christmas tree. It holds a very special place in our lives, which is odd. It is about, after all, a drunk millionaire playboy who falls in love with a waitress from Queens played by Liza Minelli. But it's not so much the movie, as it is what it represents to us. I'm sure we must have watched the movie many dozens of times by now. On New Years Day we watched both Arthur and it's less sucessful sequel one after another. And we laughed and laughed. Together.

I thought of this quote just now as I was doing the dishes, alone, and thinking that I should find someone to do the dishes with. Dishwashers are luxaries in Rhode Island, apparently, which is annoying but such a minor sacrifice that it's hardly worth mentioning. But as I was rinsing my dishes just now and then switching the water back and forth and drying and turning the faucet on and off and on again I thought of how nice it would be to have someone to do the dishes with. Like a girlfriend, or a wife. Not someone to do the dishes for me (as the stereotype goes), because while it can be a one person task, it would just be much...more...efficient for two people to accomplish. I see couples doing the dishes together in the movies, I know that part of life exists. Somewhere out there.

I feel like I had more to write. But the words and thoughts have seemed to vanish. As I typed that last sentence these words came across my speakers: "You do lose what you don't hold."--Joanna Newsom
  ¶ 1/10/2007 10:53:00 PM