HOW TO DO LAUNDRYBY BETHANY JEAN CLEMENTMy father is congenitally incapable of doing laundry. When I was a child, this deficit in his knowledge, in his complete understanding of all the things in the world and how each of them worked, was little short of shocking. He would try to do laundry, and he would fail, abjectly, a high percentage of the time. He knew, for example, to check each and every pocket of every clothing item before consigning it to the washing machine, and yet he consistently laundered ballpoint pens—consistently as in pretty much every time he did laundry. He always carried a pen (a grown-up thing), and a pen would find a way to sneak in. Safely inside the washing machine, inundated and churning around, the pen would work its way out of its pocket, divest itself of its cap, then have its way with all the garments in the load—inking up stuff in a seemingly celebratory way, freed from the dull, controlled world of words into a glorious aqueous spree. That this would lead to the end of the pen—its lifeblood spilled and its shell consigned to the old bucket that acted as the basement trash can—concerned the pen not.
