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Is the laundromat the last bastion of public life?
The world is vast and varied — different foods, cars, buildings, beliefs, and political systems wherever you go. Yet somehow, laundromats are always exactly the same.In an era of technologically dehumanizing isolation, I find myself seeing beauty in the most mundane moments of human connection or human commonality.Universal, they stretch from the northern Atlantic to the southern Pacific. Where there are people and where there is civilization, there is laundry and there are laundromats.Watching the washersI remember waiting in a laundromat in northern France. It was right across the street from the Super-U. It was long and thin with tall windows that stretched from the floor to the ceiling. It was late November, the low sun was warm on the seats next to the windows, our clothes turning back and forth behind the tightly sealed window facing us. The silence of the warm carpet, our winter coats unbuttoned though still on, as we waited for our clothes to finish before walking back to the apartment. In Chicago, my laundromat had long rows of metal machines. They loaded from the top and took six quarters per cycle. You slipped the quarters in the little slots and only once all six were filled could you push the metal slider forward. A few seconds later, the machine would start. There were boxes of overpriced dry laundry soap next to the front door and a few benches next to the bathrooms that were always occupied by people staring down at their phones. I would wait in the corner, leaning against a rumbling dryer, looking up from my phone only when someone got up to move their wet clothes from washer to dryer. I would see wrinkly shirts, knotted sweaters, socks, pants, and skirts as they shuffled their clothes to another metal machine. When I lived in Jerusalem, I washed my clothes at a laundromat close to Kikar Tzion. It was usually quiet, though never entirely empty. There was always someone else there talking quietly on the phone, listening more than speaking. Sometimes in Hebrew, sometimes in Russian, sometimes in French. The walls were covered with posters and printouts with little tags with phone numbers that could be torn off and slipped into your pocket if you were interested in whatever they were selling. Metal machine musicLast week, our washer broke. On Saturday night, I took three loads plus two kids out in a snowstorm to the laundromat to get the laundry done.It was empty, with the exception of the guy at the front desk who greeted us kindly as we stumbled in knocking the snow off our boots on the long black carpet. There was a TV in the corner, a couple tables with chairs, long lines of big, silver machines, and a few teal seats that looked like they were made in 1982. The kids and I loaded up the machines, poured in the detergent we had brought from home, and began listening to the low hum as the clothes began to spin.The sound is always the same in every laundromat. There’s never loud music on a stereo; if there's a TV, it’s always muted or very quiet. Even the people waiting for their socks and underwear behave as if they're in a library, talking in low voices by the rumbling machines and spinning heat. RELATED: The A&W Drive-In in Cortland, New York, isn't just a lunch spot — it's a time machine Jim Steinfeldt/Getty ImagesOn the scentThe smell too; it’s always the same. All laundry soap all over the world has that same detergent-y scent. Soft, flowery, and lightly chemical. Detergent in Italy and detergent in Israel may have different names from detergent in America or detergent in Iceland, but they all are basically the same. The world is big and there are so many people, but all their clothes smell the same. At the laundromat, people wash their most intimate garments in public, together. They carry their laundry baskets in and wash the things they only show their significant others right next to the things that someone else only shows theirs. We never acknowledge any of this, and this is why we all hurry to put our clothes in, or change our clothes over, when we are at the laundromat. We all have a secret to protect, and we are all stuck together, in public, with the spinning machines, the low hum of the heat, and the smell of chemical flowers. Together aloneThis is part of why we are all fairly quiet as well. It’s like we don’t actually want to acknowledge that anyone else is really there washing their clothes right alongside ours. We may make small talk, but we don’t say much. Laundromats are almost something like holdovers from a more necessarily communal time. Waiting and watching the people sitting and their clothes spinning, I have thought about how all the women must have washed clothes down by the river, or wherever it was they did laundry, in the ancient days. In an era of technologically dehumanizing isolation, I find myself seeing beauty in the most mundane moments of human connection or human commonality. The things we share even if we don’t dwell on them. The things we do together even if we are alone. The spinning machines, the private garments we want to keep to ourselves, the smell of the detergent, the quiet as we wait.
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