A Stain Free Life

I have a confession to make.

I am not my mother!

Mom was a wonderful woman who had many talents. She was a good cook, great baker, she could sew and knit, was a very good golfer, liked by most people, could sketch, do many artistic things and she was one of those women that kept a clean house. Of course she had her faults, but she is gone now and so are the memories of those negative things we all carry around with us.

I suppose that she wasn’t always like that, she would have to learn how to do most of those things, but I suspect that she was the kind of person that found learning what she enjoyed a pleasure. Well, we are all like that aren’t we? A lot of those activities would have been learned over time and for a good part of that learning I was more concerned with growing up and what was for dinner than what my mom was doing. Maybe she learned those things once I left home and she had some free time when she didn’t have to scrub grass stains out of the knees of two boy’s pants.

Most of the clear memories I have are when I was an adult with kids of my own, and those were infrequent since we lived the better part of a country away from each other. I remember her fussing over the kids and making sure they had enough to drink and plenty of pastry to eat. The thing that I have been thinking of today is that she would do the dishes almost before they got dirty. I’d put a cup or a plate down and the next thing I know, she would have scooped it up and was washing and rinsing it in the sink. How do you get like that?

I’ve been known to leave plates, bowls and glasses in the sink for days. Those are the ones that I could have put in the dishwasher and was too lazy to do even that. There are things that I have to wash by hand and unless I need them they could sit for weeks, well, not weeks, but a very long time. It takes almost no time to do a quick wash and rinse, but for some reason I must think I am too busy to clean them right away.

Today I had to clean a muffin tin that had been “soaking” for a couple of days, you know to soften the odd bit of muffin that baked onto the pan. It had soaked enough after the first ten minutes, but I guess I just wanted to be sure it would be an easy clean. Well, that and I am basically lazy. I moved it out of the sink and noticed that it had been in there long enough to leave a few rust stains on the bottom of the sink. How long had that been there? Certainly long enough to form rust and long enough to stain a stainless steel sink.

How is that possible? By the very name, a stainless steel sink is stainless. I even watched a TV show once that predicted what would happen to the world if people just disappeared and one of the things that would still be around after 1000 years were the stainless steel sinks. Not if they had a muffin tin soaking in them when we left I suppose. To be truthful, I am constantly cleaning different stains out of the stainless steel sink and it is starting to piss me off.

I wonder if there is an 800 number I could call to complain. What would I say? “That fucking sink you sold me gets stained all of the time!”

“That’s not possible sir, unless you are stupid enough to leave dishes or (God forbid) a muffin tin soaking for several days, and who in their right mind would do that?”

It kind of takes the anger out of you when it’s pointed out that everything is your fault. Well, I guess I should start to be more Mom-like and do the dishes when and before they get dirty. Mind you, there is that dishwasher that will store a whole lot of dishes and as long as I don’t buy one of the stainless steel varieties and stop making muffins, I should be able to live a stain free life.