March 16, 2022: Inanimate Clamor -

I don’t know if this tiny bar of hotel soap is very needy, or very bossy, or if it is just extremely good at articulating its needs. But I’m leaning towards needy.

Sometimes it seems that too many things are talking to me. The soap reminded me of a hot-air hand dryer at a coffee shop up the road that proudly proclaimed, “I’m a touchless dryer!” On it, someone had taped a helpful little note that said, “Sometimes I need to be touched.” And on that note, someone else had written, “I hear you.”

I always found that one poignant, and yes, you may roll your eyes.

I don’t mind that the yogurt container lid wishes me well, or that the inside of the ketchup bottle-cap has wisdom to impart. I doubt the phone pole's sincerity, but someday I will bring a step stool and a Sharpie and get up there and write, "So are you!" and then we'll be even. (Are they still called phone poles?)

And I'm inured to tea products coming on all aphoristic. They can’t help themselves.

But I’m unsure about the attitude of the Alpenrose milk cartons, joshing all of us who have opened the wrong end. Do they yearn to do standup? Are they snarky? And more intriguingly – do they work? Do people read the little message and check themselves, or do they blearily open the wrong end anyway, early in the morning?

And finally, where ARE our dustpans? That’s my handwriting. I found the note recently, sitting on a shelf where it wasn’t the week before. I don’t know exactly how it appeared, nor do I know when I wrote it, but it would have been a while ago. Where WERE our dustpans? It’s a mystery, but it seems they have returned, and not one of them has an exhortation engraved on it. I respect their silence.