Ellie's Towel

Image credit: Photo by limonada on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

A few years ago, I was visiting my friend Ellie and was a guest in her house for the first time in my life.  I had just taken a shower and was standing in her bathroom, a wet towel in my hand, at a loss for what to do.  Should I hang the towel on the rack?  Sling it over the shower?  Hang it on the bar inside the shower door?  And should I fold it in half or lay it out flat?  Maybe I should fold it in thirds?  Should I throw it in the laundry room?  Or maybe there was some other way of handling towels that I wasn't even aware of...  These seem like small things, but they deeply concerned me.  What was the right way to take care of a wet towel?

Oh, sure.  I knew what I would do at home.  But I also eat in front of the TV, chewing with my mouth open and resting my bare feet on the coffee table, at home.  And that, my friends, is certainly not the "right" way to eat.  I was pretty sure that there was a way to hang the towel that would signal that I was raised by wolves and would bring shame to my entire family.  My parents would be greatly disappointed in me, knowing they had told me a million times how to hang a towel, and now, at this critical moment, I had completely forgotten all they taught me about how people ought to do things.

I was going to be judged and found wanting.  I was going to be unmasked for what I was: crude and thoughtless.  Ellie was going to walk into that bathroom, see that towel hung up in some clearly, horribly, offensively wrong manner and was going to think I didn't love her enough to take care of her towels properly.  I'd never be invited back.  Our friendship would grow distant.  All over this towel!  And even if — through a sheer luck, — I passed this towel test, I was probably going to use the wrong fork at dinner.  Or put my elbows on the table.  Or forget to make my bed in the morning (I don't make mine daily at home).  Or make the bed the wrong way.  Or put my foot square in my mouth over something.

There went my brain, dashing off down those rutted, well worn tracks.  I'd seen people in my life cut down and cut out for things like the way they hang their wet towels, and I'd been cut down and cut out for similar things enough in past relationships that such questions and worries had become a matter of habit.  Somewhere along the line, I'd gotten it into my head that there was a right way to do everything, and everything must be done that way, perfectly.  If not, what followed was judgment, shame, humiliation, rejection and abandonment.  Those thoughts were so routine, I never even noticed them.  But this time, standing there in Ellie's bathroom, with a little bit of recovery behind me, I finally caught myself on that race to Crazytown and laughed out loud.  For crying out loud, it's a wet towel!  And everything is going to be ok, no matter how I hang it up.

So, I hung up the towel, left the bathroom and joined Ellie for breakfast.

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This post was originally published at The Second Road.