About eight years ago, we bought a black Bonneville, new from the dealership It was the first car we owned whose daily maintenance didn’t involve duct tape, and we enjoyed the novelty of being able to drive over speed bumps without having to get out of the car and check for any damage with a tape dispenser in hand.
A few months later when we bought our condo, we had to fill out some paperwork to register our car with our parking spot. The guard who took our application approved of the car, but he had some reservations about the color. “Black is a big responsibility,” he told us. “It’s hard to keep clean.”
I’d always associated the phrase “ big responsibility” with, say, the care and feeding of quintuplets. It seemed a bit of a stretch to apply the phrase to keeping a car clean.
But then winter came and with it, snow and ice and salted roads, and I realized that raising quintuplets could not possibly be as time-consuming as keeping a dark-colored car shiny through a Chicago winter.
Later, after we installed glass display shelves in the kitchen, I realized that I’d found the analogous, indoor mate to the black car, because glass shelves, my friends, are a big responsibility. This is because if there is a floating particle of dust within 50 yards of said shelves, a special magnetic field is activated. The particle will immediately send a distress call to its friends, who are further entrapped. This is Science, pure and simple. Within seconds of wiping glass shelves, hundreds of thousands of dust particles have been re-colonized. It is no coincidence that the word futility was added to the lexicon only after glass shelves were invented.
Nonetheless, glass shelves installed means glass shelves to be maintained. And so last Monday afternoon, I tackled two more items on my Put-Off List: wiping down the glass shelves and all the items on them. That they have already been colonized with a hundred million particles of dust does not deny my right to cross the tasks off my list, for now.
