My mother and I have an ongoing dispute over the proper placement of silverware in the dishwasher. I always place my forks, spoons and knives in the dishwasher with the handles up. My mother places them in with the handles down, because she says the silverware gets cleaner that way. And perhaps they do, I tell her. But what happens after the dishwasher has run its cycle, and then I have to remove the silverware by placing my grubby little fingers on the parts of the spoons and forks that are supposed to go in people’s mouths? And isn’t it dangerous to handle the knives by the blades?
When I say this, my mother always nods and says, “That’s probably true.” But as soon as she thinks I’m not looking, she goes right on putting the silverware in the dishwasher with the handles down.
The correct way to load a dishwasher is a relatively small matter in the grand scheme of things, but I think our ongoing disagreement is a good illustration of a much bigger problem. Because most of us tend to believe that our way of doing things is the best way, and our way of thinking is the only way. And then we cause a whole lot of trouble by trying to convince everyone else that we’re right.
If you’ve ever had a “discussion” with someone who holds different views from you, especially on such sensitive topics as politics or religion, you know what I’m talking about. Those are two topics where people have never had much tolerance for disagreement. But even different beliefs in how we raise our children, how we run our households, how we celebrate holidays….heck, just about anything these days….can cause us to lose our tempers and lash out at those we think of as “other.”
I guess it’s just hard for us to accept that it’s not our place to tell everyone else what to think or how to act. It seems to be human nature to like our own way best, and to harbor the belief that the world would be such a better place if everyone else just “got with the program” and came around to our way of thinking. But it doesn’t work like that. Because the people who are different from us like their way best, too. And they also think that the world would be so much better if we would just wise up and agree with them.
The best thing we can do, I think, is to live our lives as best we can according to our own convictions, and to be very open about what we believe and why. And if someone else wants to share their beliefs with us, we can listen to what they have to say and really think about why we do or do not agree with them. Sometimes minds will be changed, but often they won’t. And that’s okay, because other people are allowed to be different. They really are.
So I will keep right on loading the silverware in my dishwasher with the handles up, and my mother will keep right on putting the handles down. And that’s fine, because either way, we’ll still end up with clean silverware.
Picking the furniture she wanted to take was the easy part. But once we moved on to her books, kitchen stuff, china, photos, towels, holiday decorations, clothes, keepsakes, etc., thing became much more complicated. No one wants to part with precious family heirlooms, but trust me, after you’ve “discovered” the fourth box filled with old dishes that some distant aunt brought back from her trip abroad, you really begin to rethink just exactly what is precious and what is not. Especially when you know that your mom’s new home doesn’t have room for most of it.
We also found an invitation to wedding of my great-grandfather to my great-grandmother, which I plan to frame. And it was great fun looking through the folder my parents had made when we were planning my wedding, especially when we looked at the prices that were being considered. My dad had written, “I told them to forget it!” next to the name of one venue, so I guess it’s safe to assume that they were a bit more expensive than the $11.95 per person we eventually paid for my reception.
At first it was sort of fun to stand on our front porch and watch the rain come down, once we were sure it was safe to do so. But then we noticed that the water was steadily rising, and that some of the neighbor’s recycling bins were floating down the street. Soon the water was up to the hubcap’s of my daughter’s car, which was parked in front of our house. Our drive-way looked like a river, and we watched, fascinated, as several plastic drainage pipes floated down our driveway, followed by small branches and what looked like an Amazon Prime package. As my one-year old grandson so eloquently put it, “Oh, no!”
Muddling Through My Middle Age 