People started noticing that as I washed dishes I wasn’t actually looking down at the dishes I was washing. I moonily ran a dishrag over the plates but stared ahead. If I was lucky I stared through a kitchen window. And that did happen, when I was a teenager,when I started washing. I dreamt about things when I started washing. I dreamt of bigger things. I missed greased spots on the dishes. My mother stopped asking me to wash them.

Friends stopped asking. I was known as the spaced out dishwasher. Someone wrote a song about me. My mother. She was a one-hit wonder. But she made a good fortune off of that song and used part of it to fund my college education.

I was hired to dishwash in the dorm cafeteria. I went to a school with 30,000 undergraduates. You can imagine.

I told some people about my mother’s song so they started playing it during my dishwashing scenes. And, yes, they were scenes because I was now being taped. There was an MTV special. John Leguizamo played me. Somehow, I managed to get a degree during all of this.

Now I’m fifty and I eat out of cans. Not to avoid dishes. Not because I’m poor. But because no one notices. I can eat in peace when there are no dishes to wash or people to watch me doing them. My mother has since passed away and so I do mark her birthday by washing dishes and thinking of her.

Best regards,