Dust

"Forrest?  Can you dust the glass table?  Thanks."  This from my wife of so many years I can't much remember any other female ever even being in my life.  And, she is having real problems with her vision; problems that make it difficult for her to walk, and impossible to see anything on the floor in front of her.  How the Devil can she see dust from all the way across the room?

Personally, I think it has to do with genetics and the differences in the way males and females evolved.  Guys are unequipped when it comes to seeing dust.  This has little to do with our eyes.  I'm positive of this because it's easy for me to see a '57 T-Bird across six busy lanes of traffic in plenty of time, as it approaches at a combined speed of 130MPH, to note if it is one of the porthole models or not.  No, I think that guys are just more concerned with larger things in life than mere dust.

We much prefer to clean engine oil stains from the garage floor.  There's, like, a complete difference in having the neighbor down the street come by and see me sweeping a bunch of oil absorbing chemicals back and forth in the garage and having him catch me with a fuchsia feather duster clutched in my hands, waiving it back and forth over some knock-off designer coffee table.  And, the Good Lord knows, I'd rather have grease and oil stains on my jeans than a layer of dust.  Jeez - even a coat of mud and grass stains beats dust. 

I believe dust to be a sort of modern invention.  I think most of it came from somewhere around Arkansas and Oklahoma in the 1930's and we have been wasting much more time and energy removing it from the horizontal portions of our lives than it's worth ever since.  Gee, thanks, Tom Joad, you created this mess and then moved to Sunny, California.  I happen to know where that is, just north of Fresno, 'cause I lived nearby a long time ago.  Thanks a lot. 

I'm not real sure that's true, but I can find very little reference to dust on the Internet before those times.  Lack of information is, in fact, information in itself.  So, I'm still leaning toward believing the dust was all made in some sort of bowl in the 30's. I couldn't find a picture of the bowl - someone must have broken it before the camera could be located.  Times were tough back in the day.  Mostly all that pops up by searching the Internet before then is concerned with something about "dust to dust,"  and I'm thinking maybe that phrase got mixed up with the phrase "dawn to dusk" in one way or another.  It gets a little confusing, but I try my best.

In any case, dust was never the problem before the 30's that it is now, and for SURE that's because of the energy crisis.  You see, before heating oil and gas got so darned expensive, it was OK to have leaky houses and the dust just sort of blew through them.  In one wall and out the other.  The dust was only slowed on it's journey by our walls, and things were kept pretty clean in this manner for most of recorded history.  If you can show me even one picture of an American Indian using a feather duster to clean his tee-pee back in the 1880's I'll change my mind.   

Modern houses are the bane of mankind.  They simply refuse to let dust leave.  Any dust at all that finds it's way into our tightly wrapped and highly insulated homes these days is trapped inside.  The only way out is on the fuchsia, or electric orange, feathers of a duster that is banged on an exterior wall after having run over any number of interior flat surfaces. 

Just looking at the bunch of faux feathers makes me wonder who decides what color a feather duster should be.  I personally want to put the guy out of his misery.  Heaven knows from the colors he chose, he must suffer greatly, and needs to travel on.

There may be another cause of dust, but I'm really reaching here, so you might want to just skip the next couple of paragraphs. 

Easy credit and the subsequent explosion of consumer debt just might be what causes dust.  But, again it's gonna be hard to separate this one from other 1930's influences.  Back then, before dust was much of a problem, and before there was easy credit, people mostly could afford to buy only stuff they used everyday.  And, every time it was used, it was...Ta-Da...Dusted!  Yeah, that's right, by the hand that used it!

Today our homes are filled with stuff we use only occasionally.  You know, like the fondue pot you bought back in the seventies that has not felt hot oil for the last decade?  Or the dog treat holder that sings "Who let the dogs out." every time the lid is opened?  That was real cute the first fifty-seven times, but lately the treats are left in the bag on TOP of the stinkin' thing because listening to it sing even one more time will cause a serious case of brain damage.  We can afford to have all this new and un-needed stuff laying around our joints becasue of easy credit and it's mostly good only to provide additional surfaces that attract dust.

Well, the easy answer , for a guy, to the whole dusty business would be to toss all the unused stuff in the bag that goes to the Salvation Army store and let someone else dust it.  As the Marines say "Simpli fy."  Girls, on the other hand, have evolved to think completely differently about these weighty matters.  They seem to enjoy having all this dusty crap around. I happen to enjoy the girl with whom I live.

"Sure, sweetheart.  I'll go get the feather duster."