The Lint Roller Piece

Lint rollers. We have two long-haired, light-colored collie dogs, who shed heavily pretty much year round and ensure that everything we own or wear is coated in dog hair. Some people, such as the woman who gave birth to me, find this, should we say, distasteful and refuse to enter our home without a fresh lint roller tucked into her purse. Others, such as myself, cheerfully accept the state of affairs and occasionally, if a social or professional situation warrants it, wrap a desperate loop of Scotch tape around a hand for some last-minute futile patting. If I had a dime for every time somebody asked me on first sighting, "Wow. You must have a dog," let's just say I would have my own, in-house dry cleaner on call.

But I did not want to write about lint rollers because I find them fascinating, which--heave shared sigh of relief--I do not. I wanted to write about them because this weekend, when my visiting mother whipped hers out of her purse and started rolling down her black pants, Lily watched for a few minutes, transfixed. "Sands?" she finally asked.

"Yes, Lily," my mother answered, distracted by the monumental task ahead of her--she still had the sweater to go.

"I don't understand why you're doing that. You're just going to have to do it again." My mother thought this was pretty funny, as well as true, and we all laughed, some of us less enthusiastically or sympathetically, but I kept thinking about it for some reason, and then--late, late at night as I was on my hands and knees picking up toys--I realized why.

So much of my days, these days, are spent doing the same things over and over again in what could be a sort of Zen exercise, if I were an entirely different, much more relaxed, potentially Buddhist type of person. Instead, I am tightly-wound and full of nervous energy and determined to fend off the chaos that threatens to wash in at any moment, thanks to thousands of puzzle pieces, doll clothes, dropped snack pieces, scraps of paper, bits of chalk, loose socks, the occasional errant banana peel or toast rind. Each meal, as Annika drops food off her high chair, the dogs eat the desirable droppings, and I find myself picking up the bits of the rest of the floor, I do not feel like an aspiring Buddhist. I feel like a person for whom a lint roller could serve as a symbol of daily existence, and for all you lint roller lovers out there (Mom), I do not mean this in a good way.

Why do we do the same things over and over and over again, knowing as we do them that we will be doing them again before the paint has dried? The immediate answer is that we have to, or we soon become a crazy person living under piles of garbage and the subject of a piece on Dateline or NY1. But I'm talking about other things, less dramatic or health-threatening things, such as, well, rolling the stray dog hairs off of our pants when we know, all along, the dogs aren't going anywhere and we're going to have to sit back down on the couch.

I think we do them because in spite of the fact that everybody I know, myself included, seems to be so busy we never sit down, life is made up, in a way, of these small acts of renewal, and in doing them, we are making a statement, to ourselves, and to the rest of the world. We are saying: It all matters, it all means something, it all keeps the world turning, sun rising, future coming. We do it, all of it, because we need to fill our days with living.

And that may be the only time I have ever--or ever will again--take on the subject of lint rollers.