Surviving on My Own: A Soap Opera

A big part of growing up is learning how to survive on your own, and I feel my parents did a good job in general with that daunting challenge so that by the time I went off to college I was able to deal with most things that came along.

Before I went to college, I even learned how to wash and iron my own laundry. I was so good at it that for a while I ironed my tee-shirts. I remember Mom telling me to always be sure that I used laundry detergent and to never ever use dish soap in the laundry. She didn't really tell me why.

I'll admit to washing a bunch of whites with one small red thing (okay, not too small ... it was a table cloth, but it had been in the family for years so I figured all the red that would wash out of it had already come out). I didn't know that Mom had dyed the table cloth before sending it to me. Every white shirt I owned turned a deep pink.

So it came to pass that I survived five years in college, I graduated, and I landed my first job with General Electric in Schenectady, New York. It was a great job in a great town, and I thoroughly enjoyed the three years I spent there. My second and third years in Schenectady, I rented a house and had a roommate named Jeff.

One Saturday Jeff had to go in to work to get some stuff done, and I played the part of the domesticated roommate for a while but I really wanted to get back to the book I had been reading. I tidied the living room, took out the garbage, and I washed some dishes and loaded up the dishwasher with the plates that were in the sink.

I was dismayed to find that the dishwasher detergent box was empty, and then I remembered I had used it up last time but had forgotten to buy more. Hmm. I really wanted to get back to my book, and I figured on a Saturday morning the grocery stores would be packed and I was thinking it would be at least a 45 minute proposition to go to the store and back. I looked around.

Ah! Dish soap. Then I heard Mom's voice in the back of my head, "Don't ever use dish soap for doing laundry."

But hey, I wasn't doing laundry. I was going to run the dish washer. And if you couldn't use dish soap in the dish washer, well hey, that just didn't sound right.

I filled up the little dispenser thing in the dish washer door, closed it, and turned it on.

Happy that the house was clean, I went back to the living room and continued reading.

It was perhaps ten minutes later that I heard a sound not too dissimilar from the Rice Krispies sound that used to be on commercials, the familiar Snap, Crackle, Pop. I put my book down a moment and listened, and then I heard the dish washer do its gurgle thing. Oh, I must have just been hearing water coming into or out of the machine. I continued reading.

Another few minutes later, I heard the sound again. It was louder. I was sitting with my back to the kitchen. The doorway to the kitchen had no door; it was an open entrance.

I turned around to see what might be happening. When I saw what I saw, a million thoughts passed through my head at once. It was something akin to what a parachutist might feel when he jumps out of a plane and pulls his rip cord, only to discover that he's wearing a backpack and not a parachute. I was in the midst of a disaster.

What I saw was a glacier-like layer of soap suds, maybe eight inches thick, oozing from the kitchen, through the doorway, and into the living room. Oh no!

I leaped off the couch and ran to the kitchen doorway. The entire kitchen floor was covered.

Taking my shoes off, I quickly waded through the soap sud glacier to the washing machine, turned it off, and pondered my next step. I ran down into the basement, found a bucket and the mop, and ran back up to the kitchen.

I dumped buckets of soap suds into the sink, but I did it too quickly and the sink filled up with soap and the soap wouldn't go down the drain. I ran water into the sink, but that only seemed to create more bubbles! So I took buckets of soap suds and poured them down the toilet, and then more buckets were poured into the bathtub and the shower.

There was soap everywhere and for a while I thought I would never be able to get rid of it. What's more, I was embarrassed about the situation, and I wanted to get it all cleaned up before Jeff got home.

For the next thirty minutes I was pouring soap suds down any drain I could find, and I was running water and flushing toilets trying to get this spectacular mountain of soap dissolved and out of the house.

At first I thought it was just a soap removal issue, which was bad enough, but it got a little more complicated because by the time I had gotten all the soap off the floor, there were dirt streaks all over from the dirt stains that loosened up during my cleaning. I ended up having to scrub the kitchen floor too so that it would look uniform in dirtiness (or cleanliness, rather).

I also had to scrub the toilets, the shower, and the bathtub. I never thought I was going to get done.

I knew how Lucille Ball felt with the conveyor belt of chocolates ... it felt like the work was building up at a torrid pace!

Jeff's car pulled into the driveway, and just before the back door opened I was back in my seat on the couch, acting deeply engrossed in the book.

The first thing he said when he walked through the back door and into the kitchen was, "Wow!"

I asked, "What?"

Jeff said, "Thanks for scrubbing the kitchen floor! I had been thinking about doing that. It looks great!"

All I could manage was a, "Thanks Jeff."

He went upstairs, and a moment later I heard another, "Oh man!"

"What?" I asked again.

"You cleaned the toilet. And the bathtub. And the shower!"

"Well, yeah, I ... uh ... I kind of had to," I humbly replied.

"Why?" he asked.

I told him the whole story, and he laughed and then I laughed. I don't know why I had been embarrassed about the episode, except that, well, I probably should have known better.

A few weeks ago, the kids and I were cleaning the kitchen. One of the kids was going to start up the dish washer and noticed that we were out of dish washer detergent. The question was then asked if we could just use dish soap.

I smiled and said, "I've got a story for you."