I was washing dishes in
the kitchen the other day when I was reminded of a time when I was a little girl on the
island and how I had to draw water from a drum to wash dishes, among other
things, because we did not have inside plumbing. We had a little wooden table
that sat just outside our front door which we used to support a dish pan. I remember I
used to wash all the dishes first, throw that water out, then put clean water
in the pan to rinse the dishes before turning them upside down to dry in the
afternoon sun. Then it dawned on me that I was still washing my dishes in a
small dish pan all these years later even though I have indoor plumbing. It was thought provoking. I tried to remember a time when I did not
use a dish pan to wash my dishes and was hard press to think of one. I had to admit
to myself that I have always used a dish pan to wash my dishes. “Huh”, I thought
out loud. “How interesting.” Come to think of it my daughter also uses a dish
pan to wash her dishes and I wondered how much of that was as a result of her
seeing me using one. So I decided to ask her. When I posed the question to her
she asked it right back to me, “why do
you use a dish pan Ma?” I thought she was being funny. “No I
really want to know.” I told her. She then admitted that she didn't know
why she did it either. Then she proceeded to give me logical reasons why she
thought she did it, like “Maybe there was no stopper for the sink”, that “it
was more sanitary”, and “to conserve water”. All of which did not apply to me
as I have always had a sink stopper as far as I can remember, my sink is kept
in pristine/sanitized condition, and since my stopper does not leak, the water
stays in the sink just fine. Based on our conversation I concluded that my
daughter was doing it because she saw me doing it when she was growing up. After not being able to come up with a
reasonable answer for using a dish pan I decided that the very next time I wash
dishes I would use the kitchen sink instead of the dish pan. So I've been doing it for a week now and I
must admit it feels a bit weird. I can’t
remember a time before this that I had not use a dish pan. In fact now that I think
about it, just about everyone in my family uses a dish pan to wash their
dishes, even my cousin Dahlia. Guess we have all been conditioned to do so.
It reminded me of a
story I read somewhere, no doubt a forwarded email of some sort, where a woman
was in the kitchen preparing a roast for the evening dinner when her daughter noticed
that she took a large knife and proceeded to cut off the each end of the
roast before placing it in a roasting pan. “How odd.” She thought just before she asked her mom, “Hey Mom, why did you cut of the ends of the
roast?” to which her mom replied, “I
don’t know I have always done that. My mom did it so I do it too.”
Determined to get an answer to her question, the young girl went into the living room
where her grandmother was sitting watching TV.
She said, “Hey grandma, why do you
cut the ends off the roast before you put it in the pan?” The Grandmother
looked up from her TV show with a confused look on her face. “I don’t know” she said. “ I've always done that. I saw my mom do it so
I do it.” Now the girl was intrigued.
She picked up the phone and called her great-grandmother at the senior citizen
home. When the attendant put her great-grandmother
on the phone she said, “Hey Nana, why do
you cut the ends off the roast before you put it in the pan?” Expecting to
hear some great family secret she listened closely as there was a pause on the
line, then her Nana said, “So it could fit in the pan.” Funny, huh? For three
generations the women in that family passed down a ritual of cutting the ends
off a roast because no one ever stopped to ask why.
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