Year of the Acadian Triangle Vignettes: Laundry and other Exotic Places

It’s amazing how exotic Wisconsin…isn’t. 

~Lucy Moderatz, While You Were Sleeping

I love to travel, but chafe under the restrictions of hauling around lots of luggage, so I tend to wear jeans more than once and do laundry along the way. Sometimes this means scrubbing clothes in the sink and getting creative about drying everything out before it gets stuffed back inside a backpack or suitcase. In Paris I found a laundromat only a couple of blocks from the hotel… incidentally, not far from this unusual art park that reminded me of that Paris raincoat fashion photography scene from Sabrina (1995).

Laundromats are interesting places. Some people guard their possessions like a hawk, anxiously hovering in place. Others bring their knitting or reading or children or homework and settle in to stay awhile. And some, like those who used this laundromat apparently, feel comfortable walking away and coming back later. 

The laundromat was empty, although most of the dryers were full of slowly spinning clothes. I appreciated the lack of audience as I puzzled through the instructions. It is one thing to read a foreign language and get the basic gist of what is being said; instructions are a whole different ball of wax. Honestly, my reading comprehension of instructions written in English is rather pitiful, too. Putting together furniture or a cake or lawn equipment seems to require an inordinate amount of time spent deciphering the correct sequence of events and debating whether to throw the directions out and wing it. I figure “winging it” probably comes with regrets, too. (Unless the instructions are translated into English by way of Chinese or German, in which case winging it becomes mandatory.)

I think this particular sequence was puzzling because I had to pay to start the washer before I could purchase the soap, and I was worried about making sure I put the soap in the correct dispenser…container…thing… before the water washed through it and I missed the golden window of opportunity for adding cleansing suds to my dirty clothes. I finally had it all worked out in my head when a Chinese young man came into the laundromat. It was a fairly small room—maybe 12’x16’?—so he could easily see that I was still hesitating when he came in, and he could apparently also tell I was American, because he told me how it all worked, in English. That was a tiny prick to my bubble of pride, having just barely figured it out for myself, but it was nice to know I was on the right track. 

It also made me laugh, remembering the time my Wyoming roommate stumbled over an English word she couldn’t remember while speaking at the pulpit in church. She’d just returned from an 18-month Mandarin-speaking mission, so her native English was feeling a bit rusty. She leaned over to ask our mainland Chinese neighbor sitting in the front row—in Mandarin—and he translated the word into English for her. Some days are like that with foreign languages.

The young man stayed to chat. There was a long bench and some hard plastic chairs in the middle of the tiny room, and I had come prepared with an entire library of books on my Kindle to pass the time. Instead, I found myself drawn into the most interesting conversation with a Chinese man living in Paris, with big dreams of going to America someday. His broken English was far, far better than my French, and I wasn’t opposed to listening to him talk my ear off. His sister already lived in America, and he was waiting patiently for his visa so he could join her.

While we chatted, a woman came in and commandeered all the dryers, actually removing other people’s clothes and setting them on the counter so she could spread her clothes out among the rest of the dryers so they would dry more quickly. The cutthroat laundromat strategies were duly noted, and I mentally prepared to stake my claim on a dryer when the time came.

He talked about America in glowing terms, a bit like Feivel Mousekewitz sang that there are no cats in America and the streets are lined with cheese. It made me smile. I love America, faults and all, and it was fun to hear his enthusiasm for my home. He was telling me all the places he wanted to visit and asking me questions along the way. And then he said the top of his list, the pinnacle of his dreams, the crème de la crème…. was Cleveland.

Ohio?

There’s a lot of places in America I’ve never been, but I have to confess… Cleveland isn’t even on my list. I’m sure it’s a lovely place, but it just seems so…. ordinary.  Like somewhere you live because you were born there or because your job transferred you there. Not some place you dream of living some day. Especially not for someone who already lives in Paris, haha, which *is* the sort of place people dream of visiting some day.

But it turned out that he loved watching a television show called Hot in Cleveland. I’d never heard of it before (which isn’t unusual… I haven’t watched tv for twenty years, so I have no idea what’s happening in television land most of the time.) I finally looked it up a few days ago, and laughed a little through the 20-minute sitcom pilot, about three Los Angeles women who are flying to Paris for a two week vacation and accidentally end up in Cleveland. And they decide to stay. And Betty White plays the tenacious caretaker of the house they lease.

I still think Cleveland is ordinary, and it’s still not on *my* list of exciting places to visit, but I guess I can see the appeal. Sometimes we don’t appreciate just how exotic our own backyard looks to people who’ve never been there before. 

Now, Vasili’s dream (in The Hunt for Red October) of living in Montana and Arizona resonates a little more just ‘cause I’m partial to the West, and I’ve lived in one state and visited the other. They’re each beautiful in their own way, and perfect for someone looking forward to a little peace and quiet… and horizons wider than a submarine. There’s room to breathe and hear yourself think and soak in the colorful desert, prairie, and mountain hues and scents.

When I first started taking Tae Kwon Do classes, there were all these complicated rituals and Korean words, weapons and poom-sae and uniforms with belts, that initially seemed daunting. It was a whole new culture, and a bit like drinking from a firehose to absorb it all and get it right. One day our instructor talked to us about competing in local and regional tournaments, and the pinnacle of all tournaments at the national headquarters… in Little Rock. 

Arkansas?

It’s amazing how exotic Arkansas… isn’t.