at home in the neighborhood: the laundromat

I do laundry every Tuesday morning at 7:00. The night before I portion out my detergents and sort our dirty clothes into colors and whites. In the morning, bright and early, my two heavy bags are ready to be loaded into my cart and pushed down the street to be cleaned.

The laundromat I use is about three blocks away and is run by a Chinese woman named Peggy. Until very recently, Garrett came with me to wash our clothes, strapped either to my front or my back in the infant carrier. He and Peggy hit it off pretty quick, likely due to the fact that she finds immense pleasure in harnessing the attention of small children. At first Garrett didn't know how to respond appropriately, but by the time he was about ten months old, he'd let Peggy take him on walks to visit neighboring storefronts (and thus allowing me to switch my loads with two hands instead of just one).

Garrett isn't the only one to have made friends there. Nearly each week I'm joined at the washers with other "Tuesday regulars." There's Karen, who's due with her first baby in just a few weeks and with whom I've had fabulous conversations with, not only at the laundromat, but out on the sidewalks when we run into each other when we're out and about in the neighborhood. And the lady Peggy calls "Grandma" whose voice is husky because she steps outside during the short time that I'm there three or four times to smoke yet another cigarette. There's Agnes, from Ireland, who truly is a grandmother, who comes in to wash only a small load of clothes which she then takes home to line dry. And Debbie and her grown daughter, who I now see more often out in the neighborhood than I do in the laundromat, and who, despite the fact that she doesn't see us every Tuesday like she used to, still stops me on the sidewalk to ask in her thick Brooklyn accent how Garrett is doing.

If I time things just so, and am able to work quickly (i.e. sans Garrett), I can be in and out in just over an hour. My tendency towards efficiency comes not only from a need to get home quickly so that Blake can catch the train to work, but also because coin operated machines in NYC are not cheap, and I can't afford to be haphazard. It costs $1.75 for a small washer, $3.50 for a medium, and $7.00 for a large. The dryers cost 25 cents for 6 minutes of drying time. On a typical laundry day, I use one small washer (for the whites) and one medium washer (for the colors), and then three dryers for 24 minutes apiece. If I'm lucky, I'll get to use the sole -- and coveted -- extra large dryer (which doesn't cost any more than a regular one, despite its extra capacity) for the jeans and towels.

The lulling sounds of the running washers and dryers and clinking of quarters being fed into them, in addition to the high power fans which run during the warm months, and the steady, journalistic voices of the Good Morning America anchors blaring from the TV at the front, are familiar and comforting. Now that I'm no longer wrangling a wiggly Garrett while the clothes wash and dry, I spend my hour reading,* which is just the right kind of enjoyable to keep me from dreading the folding and ironing that awaits me once I get home.


*This morning it was another chapter from The Rummage Sale, a hilarious collection of short stories by former BYU professor, Donald R. Marshall, depicting snapshots from the lives of a handful of Utah Mormons. This morning's selection was called "All the Cats in Zanzibar," and nearly had me rolling off my seat at the back of the laundromat in laughter. I don't think it's still in print, but if you can get your hands on a copy, you won't regret that you did.