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Doug's Suds

There's a tiny laundromat I walk by almost every day. I can't miss it; it's on the route between my house and the train, the bus, the library, the hardware store, and just about every other place I'd want to walk to or from. I used to spend a lot of time at this laundromat. Every time I walk by I make a note of how busy it is, how many washers are open, how many dryers are humming.

I can't help it. For the first six and a half years we lived in San Francisco, we used this laundromat (or one of a few others) to do our wash. We lived in a 440-square-foot apartment which lacked a lot of amenities. Let's see... it had a kitchen (sort of), and a bathroom, and hardwood floors, and an ocean view if you stood on your tiptoes. But it had a dearth of storage, no parking, no laundry, essentially no heat. It was charming. It was a 1906 Edwardian mansion that had been divided into six lovely and cramped apartments. It was typical San Francisco digs. It was what we could afford.

So once a week we'd cram our seven or eight loads of laundry into two giant duffel bags and schlep down to the laundromat. The huge benefit of the laundromat (or the apartment-building laundry room) is that if you're lucky, you can do a week's worth of laundry all at once. Two hours and you're done, hour and a half if you're in a hurry. The down side is that you have to go to the laundromat, and sit there while your laundry swishes and tumbles or risk having it disappear.

So we spent a lot of time at this 'mat. There is a two-person bench where I read a lot of New Yorkers. There used to be a Ms. Pac-Mac machine where Dave spent a lot of quarters.

Today I am amazed that we did six and a half years of laundry there. I trained for my first (and most of my second) ironman triathlon while we lived in that tiny apartment. That first ironman took place in March, which means I did many 100-mile bike rides in the rain. You cyclists know what that means. When you spend all day riding in the rain, the filthy water collecting on the street sprays on you constantly. You end up with about ten pieces of laundry saturated with gritty, grimy muck. In our old apartment, I'd strip the filthy stuff off, rinse it out in the bathtub, hang it dripping wet on the shower curtain rod, and let it get slightly less damp before dumping it into the laundry hamper where it sat for several days until it was laundry time.

Our apartment was essentially two rooms divided by a big sliding door, and to dry our large collection of non-dryer-safe workout clothes, we'd put them on hangers and stick the hangers up into the track for the sliding door. Between the sports bras drying on the shower curtain rod and the bike shorts hanging in the doorway, it wasn't exactly the sort of home where you'd want to welcome guests.

When we moved to our current place, which has its own washer and dryer (and parking! and an actual separate kitchen! a dining room! and closets!), we felt like we had struck gold. I know, I know, in the scheme of things our life wasn't bad just because we had to schlep our laundry six blocks down and back up a huge hill every week. But it's really, really nice that now, when I finish a dirty ride, I can leave the pile of filth in the utility sink in the garage and not track it all over our apartment. It's the little things.

November 13, 2008 10:51 PM