A Better (Laundry) Day

Years of reading Buddhist teachings have yet to cure my hatred of doing laundry. Cultivating a sense of mindfulness around mundane tasks can lead to spiritual growth, I'm told, but that damned laundry room does its best to sap whatever spirit I can come up with. So, as Caribana Sunday lures a healthy portion of my building's tenants out to the streets, I head down to the laundry room knowing that this would be the best time I'll have this week to wash the clothes piling up in my closet.

Fortunately for me today, the mind-numbing task of folding T-shirts and towels is eased by the presence of a genial grey-haired woman with a full dryer of her own. Jeanette's lived in Toronto for over forty years, she tells me, having moved here from Nova Scotia, and we begin chatting about life in the big city while pulling our clothes from the machines. At one point, the conversation turns to self-defense and I ask Jeanette how safe she feels living downtown. "Ah, I'm not afraid of anybody," she declares, looking me in the eye through thick bifocal glasses, "I worked security for fifteen years. My son's on the force." She tells a story of being followed in the street late one night by a potential mugger until enlisting a pack of squeegee kids on the corner to defend her. "It was wonderful," she says, "he goes up and grabs the guy, yelling, 'Are you following my effing mother, man? I'll effing kill you!'" I presume she's paraphrasing and I smile. Jeanette laughs as she describes having to urge the kid not to hurt her pursuer. We discuss squeegee kids, poverty and downtown safety for a while before our conversation wanders into the topic of safety at Caribana. "I won't go," she says, "I'd like to but someone gets shot every year." I confess to her the same feeling and our Caribana talk inevitably segues into the topic of race relations in general, before she eases into an old and remarkable story.

"The restaurant I worked in wouldn't serve blacks," she says. "What?" I answer stupidly, "Just like that?" "Well, you have to remember this was down east in the fifties," she replies, "They didn't accept anybody - gays, blacks, whatever. No, this black man walked into the restaurant and I served him. I didn't know any better - he's another person so I serve him, right?" "Sure," I nod. "Well then my manager comes over to me and says, 'You do that again and you're fired.' I was - what - seventeen, eighteen at the time?" "That must have been upsetting," I say. "Oh no," she says, "I wasn't about to let him away with that. 'What are you talking about?' I said, 'You're Chinese!'" "Really," I say, laughing at both the twist in her story and the eternal irony of racist minorities. "Yeah," Jeanette laughs, "he got all mad and said, 'You don't like Chinese?' and I said, 'You don't like blacks!' I'm thinking, 'Who is he to discriminate?' so I told him, 'This is my country here, my province, and you're as welcome here as he is!' The girl I worked with thought I'd be fired for sure but I didn't care. The man came in again and I served him again." "So your boss backed off, then," I check. "Oh yeah," she says, "he never said anything after that but I tell you I'll never forget the second time the black man came in. He looked so sad and he said, 'Oh, I hope I didn't get you into trouble. I don't want to be any trouble.' I tell you, this was 1953 and I'm 65 years old and I still see that man's face. He was so sad, thinking I was going to be fired because of him."

Despite myself, I stop stuffing socks inside one another and feel my eyes start to sting as Jeanette tells me this. I try not to be so sentimental but the thought of this man having to deal with both being discriminated against and feeling responsible for threatening a teenage girl's employment wounds me a little. At the same time, my heart swells with admiration for this truly heroic woman. Knowing that she'd probably scoff at such a label, I blandly tell her, "It was really great that you would do that." As expected, she waves it off, saying, "He was a person like any other and I served him like anyone. I tell you though, the last time he came in, he left a hundred dollar tip! That was a lot of money in those days," she says. "It's a lot of money now," I laugh, marveling at this lovely punchline to her story. "Yeah," she smiles, "I remember saying to the others, 'See? You'd have gotten that if you'd served him!' Plus he left a wonderful note." "What did it say?" I ask. "Oh, about how my attitude would take me far and how God would always protect me. I kept it with me for years and years afterward." "That's wonderful," I gush but she simply shrugs. "I was just doing what my parents taught me," she says as she adds to her pile to neatly folded laundry.