I did the dishes one night in 1975, at my parent's home.  I was seventeen.  Some Paul McCartney song played on a radio someplace as Carly Simon waited.  Individual bubbles hovered above a wrecked city of dishes, between mountainous clumps of suds-clouds, and with small movements of the wreckage, rare, fourtunate, trapped souls would gracefully emerge and rise to float with the clouds. 

I worried about next to nothing as I daydreamed there, at the sink where my mother bathed me over a decade before.  My father's friend, Harry Despotopoulos, had explained convincingly--the way salesmen do--that doing dishes is soothing to angry kids.  "My daughter, she wails and moans.  We're making her do too much.  We're mean.  And the younger kids should do the dishes so she can go out!  But that warm water, it calms her down, she gets her hands in that nice warm, soapy water..." 

Harry was 'the vegetable man' and appeared faithfully on Thursday afternoons to peddle fresh fruits and vegetables to my mother.  That was the first time I ever heard the word 'peddle', except for its synonym, as in 'bicycle pedal'.  His visits were like having a live auctioneer in the kitchen; before my teens, I was sure to attend every presentation as he recited the entire inventory of produce available that day.  Enthralled, I watched when he'd occasionally pause and I could see him scan, in his mind, a vast array of edibles—bananas, canteloupe, asparagus, turnips, butternut squash, green and red peppers, zuchini, and a hundred more—never leaving anything out, and retrieve details like the condition and quality, where they came from exactly, and who on his route had really liked them in the past.  And apples weren't just apples, they were Macintosh, or Delicious, and I could never distinguish the exotic names of some of these foods from his succinct descriptions of them, which fascinated me all the more. 

I loved words more than food. 

Whatever is wrong now, was wrong then, too.  I was frequently depressed, and would isolate often.  But youth's eager optimism conceals many of life's blemishes.  At best, those my age who were close enough to me and my moodiness to press an authoritative confrontation, and question the cause, were easily diverted by the whirl and swoope of their own adolescent transitions; and I was happy to escape their inquiry.  I think. 

Gone are friends from childhood, when intimacy was as simple as a sigh, and a pile of autumn leaves was a playground to be shared.  Now it is up to me to inquire as to my own well being.  Or not, and just do the dishes.