No Good Deed

My car had this weird gold carpet thingy on the dashboard. My mom had it installed about 10 years ago, when she owned the car, to protect the dash. With the car parked in the smoking hot South Texas sun ever since I took ownership four years ago, the gold carpet thingy’s black foam backing has been crumbling and leaving black dust all over the car. It was so plentiful and so daunting I just kept letting it accumulate.

That’s how I approach most household chores if we’re being honest. I may be compulsive to the point of needing medication when it comes to symmetry and pictures being perfectly centered on walls, but dog hair? lint? soap scum? DUST? These things don’t bother me as much as they should. Suzy Homemaker I am not.

But tonight, after coming home from work with a gnawing, inexplicable hunger that no amount of food would soothe, and eating a box of Wheat Thins and half a package of Brussels, and watching two episodes of NCIS on USA, and contemplating watching all the Project Runway reruns up until the finale at 9:00 tonight, I decided to do one household chore, one simple little virtuous act I’d been putting off for roughly 27 months.

I started vacuuming my car. I thought it would take five minutes to suck up five years' worth of black dust and all the sand from all the trips to Padre Island. Imagine my chagrin when the gold carpet thingy slipped right off the dash because, it turns out, the Velcro attachments had corroded right along with the black foam backing. With the vacuum roaring and the carpet thingy flapping about, the black dust swirled like a cloud of stinging gnats, flying every which way. Chunks of black foam descended as well, breaking apart and seeming to grind themselves into the gold carpet, leaving horrid black streaks that the vacuum would not get out.

Now there is a weird, filthy gold carpet thingy in a lump in the corner of my garage and about 27 pieces of Velcro stuck all over the dash where the carpet used to be. There’s no telling how much elbow grease and scraping it will take to get the impossibly permanent glue off the dash.

This might be why I’m crying and finishing the package of Brussels (and is certainly why I‘m no Suzy Homemaker). Just as no good deed goes unpunished, no simple cleaning job does either.