On the way to drop my wife off at the train, we were conversing about some domestic topic and I blurted out, “Well, I’ll have to put that on the Laundry List.”
And Sue said. “What is a Laundry List? What does that even mean?”
Which is why I love her. Because she asks the questions that may not need to be answered, but they sure are interesting to consider.
So I looked up the term Laundry List and this is how it is defined: “a long or exhaustive list of people or things.”
In the process I learned there’s a company called laundrylist.com that bills itself as is “The #1 seller of used industrial laundry machinery in North America. We specialize in the sale of used industrial equipment from Tunnel Washing Systems, Flatwork Feeders and Folders, Material Handling to Power Plants.”
That’s quite a laundry list, and rather specific and literal when you think about it.
Our laundry lists
On a more practical level, we all walk around with laundry lists of one kind or another in our heads. For example, today is my birthday, and that always makes me think back on the experiences of the past. I particularly recall my ninth birthday when my mother bought me three of the best things I’d put on my birthday list. I spent an entire peaceful day gluing together a model of some military plane that I admired. From my brother’s room down the hall, a Beatles album was playing Nowhere Man. All was right with the world. That goes on my Laundry List of Good Days in Life.
That proves our laundry lists don’t have to “exhaustive” as in “dire” or on a list of things we’d rather not remember. To do, especially.
Dirty laundry
Of course, there are actual literal laundry lists for endurance athletes. Nothing is more frustrating than going to the closet or dresser and learning all your cycling or running shorts are still down in the laundry bin. Finding socks can be a particular pain. So can all the gloves and other gear vital to healthy, active training. All must be laundered at some point, or else you have to fudge it.
It only gets worse the colder the weather gets. Here in Illinois, it is summertime now and the living is easier. A set of cycling shorts and a kit top are all it takes to get out on the bike. But don’t forget the helmet, gloves, shoes, Headsweat, Garmin, water bottles, nutrition, cell phone and sunglasses. It never gets easiers, you just buy more stuff.
There’s always a laundry list of things to track it seems. That’s the fact of human existence. Even if we could swim, ride and run naked we probably wouldn’t. Not on a daily basis anyway. Which means laundry remains a big part of our lives, and that means a laundry list to keep.
What’s on your laundry list?
Standing on the starting line of a five-mile race a few years back, I could feel the energy pouring through my body. Training had been going well. I’d done a track workout of 12 X 400 at 60-63 and was feeling sharp.
Unless you are so fit that your skinsuit looks like a coat of paint on your sculpted body, competing in triathlon typically requires a series of tradeoffs during each event. Swimming or cycling too hard in the first two stages can have a big cost when it comes time to run. More than one great cyclist in triathlon has busted a hard ride only to have jelly for legs in the run phase.
A few years back when I started dating after the loss of my wife to cancer, I met up with a gal through eHarmony. She was a little older than me and seemed straightforward enough in our online chats. So we agreed to meet at a restaurant for drinks.
The Bible is a remarkable book both in what it reveals and also what it leaves to our collective spiritual imagination. For example, the creation story and the rescue of species from the worldwide floods lists a few “kinds” of animals that God created and preserved, but the record of nature’s salvation is far from complete. There only broad mention of the zillions of kinds of insects in this world, for example. Information about how Noah and the ark were able to provide food for creatures like tropical hummingbirds that specifically depend on flowering plants evolved by length of blossom to the length of the hummingbird’s beak is somehow missing.
The weather in Illinois was cool, rainy and windy this past Saturday. We rode west and north into the wind for 25 miles. At several points our speed dropped to 13 mph as we ground into the gray gale coming from the northwest.
Those formative years of distance running remain special to me because everything was still so new. The sensations wrought from running farther than I ever imagined possible were both stimulating and daunting.
Twenty-five or so years ago, our family went camping in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It was a busy season, so campsites were scarce and the more remote campground in Hiawatha National Forest where we wanted to say was closed due to sanitary problems with the water and toilet systems.
As the week was about to wrap up, one of the campers in the site next door walked over holding out a long black object. I thought for a moment that it might be a snake, and my late wife HATED snakes. Feared them. We’d even seen a long dark water snake lying on a strip of sand earlier that week. We left that lake immediately.
I have a new black belt that I purchased recently. It’s a size 34 as well. My waist has remained the same through years of adulthood. The last couple winters my pants got a little tight at times. All my running and riding and swimming can’t quite combat the appetite of a formerly competitive athlete now in his 60s. So I’m trying to get a headstart on winter this summer. I’ve dropped ten pounds since January and want to go another seven pounds down. Whether that will remove the belly fat accumulated around my waist I have no idea.
So in many respects the black belt that I where around my waist is a chronicle of both the good and bad that I’ve accomplished over the years. Have you ever put a belt on inside out and had to pull it back out of your pants, reverse it and pull it through the belts loops again. Life itself is like that sometimes.
They might have been confusing my dad with Mr. Clean, who had no hair and wore all white as well. But you get the picture.
I was tooling along at 15-17 miles an hour most of the way. Then I threw in some harder riding after ten miles when my legs were warmed up. At the park known as Johnson’s Mound I turned to ride a loop up and over the prairie kame on which the woods has grown tall and thick.
Our family consisted of four boys and our mom and dad. We apparently had a sister that died very early in life. She was born between my next oldest brother and I. Still hoping for a girl, my parents had the name Christine Annette lined up in the event that I arrived as a female. Alas, I was a boy. I was christened Christopher Lynn Cudworth.
But you can’t grow up without adding in the influence of your parents. My father’s fierce temper and occasional bouts of physical punishment impacted us all. Some of the sibling rivalry stuff was echoes from our father’s wrath and rage. There is more than one way to pass it along.
Life is a series of experiences like that. Sometimes we exceed our own expectations. To some degree, the control group for that experiment is our sibling rivalries. They test us from the moment we’re born. By the time we go out in the world, there is an entire catalogue of successes and failures already filed in our memory.
My next oldest brother actually got royally screwed in sports when our family moved from Pennsylvania to Illinois. He was going into his senior year in high school when we moved. That is possibly the worst time of all to change schools. Moving out to the cornfields of Illinois, he lost the two sports at which he had earned starting positions in soccer and baseball. He was also aligned to be on the varsity basketball team.
