Red sneakers

RAYMUND FERNANDEZ

I am watching clothes tumbling in the machines at the laundromat. I can see the clothes because the washing machines have half globular windows through which one might gaze at the whole process. The purist functionalist designer might have correctly claimed these windows are unnecessary.

Good thing we seldom ever listen to purist functionalists anymore. The view through the window is reassuring, given that it takes exactly 76 minutes for the washing, drying and steaming process to be completed.

What would you do inside those minutes if you could not contemplate the travel of the world through those windows inside the length of time it takes to do half the week’s laundry?

If I said I’m going off to help my daughter do the laundry, that would have meant entirely something else not too long ago.

It would have meant me helping my daughter carry unwashed clothes to some faucet somewhere. In some forgotten and lost paradise years back in remembered time, the water would have been from a choice of springs on the sides of two hills facing each other.

The springs had names: Sandayong or Kalabuon. As ever depending on which one was less occupied, the choice was ours.

We preferred Sandayong. It was closer to home. But nowadays, it’s a trip to the laundromat.

We rent the machines, bring our own detergent, fabric softener and conditioner, and load the laundry into the machines ourselves.

It’s the latest development here for doing laundry, a cheaper and better alternative to the usual laundry shop where you drop off everything, face the prospect of having some stranger handling your deepest darkest secrets, face the chance of losing some of them, and all for 25 or so pesos per kilo.

Things have changed. And one might contemplate the changes from watching the laundry tumble in the washer and drier for over an hour; the window looking very much like a spinning globe, a world, a planet, spinning away an entirely washable record of that stretch of time between now and the last time the clothes were washed.

There, my off-pink T-shirt, long sleeves, informal, comfortable. I used it teaching a class in Design Theory last Tuesday. There, the dark-blue underwear I used for the trip to Albur, Bohol, in a rented motorbike to buy my favorite pottery clay.

Why? Why does life require so much of me? And why do I feel this undeniable pleasure from all this inconvenience, this difficulty? It is only the inevitable spinning of life that one must either enjoy or lose the enjoyment of.

It is reading some forgotten paperback by John Grisham. One does not ask, why?

The question is ludicrous, but not by-itself ludicrous. It is ludicrous by virtue of all that is happening in our midst. And as they happen all over the world.

World spinning like dirty laundry in the dryer. A shooter shot automatic weapon’s fire into an open-air country-music concert in Las Vegas, USA, killing 59 and wounding over 500. Over 12,000 dead in the course of the war on drugs in the country.

A possibility of complicity in drug smuggling of close associates of the architects of the war? The chance of complicity in all these by a large majority of the current Congress and businessmen?

A possibility of complicity in a crime of mass-murder? Yes, surely: To ask why is ludicrous, and so too with asking how. It is the world spinning away in its inevitable cycles of washing, spinning, wringing, steaming and becoming dirty once again. It is the world going about its merry way.

And I mustn’t complain, or complain in a manner exceeding the subtlety of a whisper. To complain too loudly is distasteful. Red P20 bill has found its way mysteriously into the laundry. It will come out absolutely washed, dried, and steamed.

Fully laundered money to help us contemplate the hows and whys of so many dying shoeless in our country. Or is it because they do not have enough to buy shoes that they die this way? No red sneakers for their laundry.