The only encounter my family members have with laundry is in their creation of it, a trick they perform merely by removing clothes from their bodies. A shirt, as it passes over the person’s neck and ears, no matter how short a time it’s been worn or how clean it might in fact be, metamorphoses, coming off the top of the head, into laundry. They are not surprised, and it elicits no remark, when that same laundry somehow transforms itself back into wearable clothes and appears again in their drawers, washed, dried and folded.

Same with the dirty dishes that somehow end up clean again, day after day, and back in the cupboards. The food supplies, my family members appear to believe, replenish themselves of their own accord. The scattered newspapers, sandals, poker chips and half-chewed dog bones that were right there on the living room floor just yesterday, oddly aren’t there now.

Does anybody besides me recognize that these things happen? Does anybody besides me know how? Has anyone in my family or yours every been heard to say, “Hey look, isn’t that empty spot right where I left my candy wrapper just a few days ago?”

Let’s face it, June Cleaver was no Martha Stewart. Mrs. Cleaver may have been able to whip up a delicious lemon pie, but were they tree-ripened Meyer Lemons? Were they freshly squeezed in a chrome and stainless steel commercial juicer? Did she layer her pastry with unsalted organic butter? Did she wield her own culinary blowtorch over the meringue to brown each perfect peak to the optimum shade of goldenness? I don’t think so. June Cleaver probably just threw the whole pie in under the broiler and let it brown unevenly.

Now that I think about it, old June wasn’t such a domestic goddess after all. She was more of a slacker.

I would like to just go ahead and make my first confession. A real bombshell, probably: I didn’t take a shower today. Whether or not I showered yesterday is probably not even worth mentioning, since I know I’ve already crossed a line that might have me excluded from neighborhood dinner parties and maybe even my own book club. So I won’t mention it.

….Here’s a little mental exercise: Let’s say you showered, but then you sweated over a pot of boiling pasta. Are you dirty now? What if you cooked the pasta, then lay down on the living room rug, on your stomach, to watch TV? Do you now need to take another shower? What if, after you perspired over the pasta, and got up off the rug, you then walked around the block and a city bus drove by in close proximity? Are you dirty now, for sure?

I know a lot of people would say, “Yes, filthy dirty. You need to be washed, deodorized, defumigated and your clothes do, too.” I know that people shower over cleaner circumstances than I’ve just described, every day.

You’re still clean enough by my standards, though. I don’t think a little sweat, accompanied by a thin layer of household dust, even when added to by a microscopic application of diesel smog, makes you all that dirty.

But don’t ask me, because according to my standards my own hair is clean. And as I said, I didn’t even wash it today.

You might expect that I’m going to give plastic surgery a good drubbing, along with all the women who’ve resorted to it, but I’m not. Because I don’t think it’s a bad thing, for someone who’s always hated her big bumpy nose, to have it smoothed out. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, for someone who’s developed a giant drooping double chin, to want to have it tucked in. I can see how it would relieve them of a certain burden.

The other reason I can’t slam plastic surgery, though, is that I’ve had plastic surgery. I know from personal experience how a woman can justify risking her very life on the operating table for an elective procedure, as daft as that sounds. I went in for it because I decided it was the only way to make my butt look smaller. I don’t even know that I can totally blame women’s magazines for this, but I’ve believed ever since I was a teenager that I had an oversized behind.

When I went to address this twenty years later, however, I didn’t go the direct route and get my butt liposuctioned. Rather, I got my breasts enlarged, on the grounds that it would balance things out. A brilliant strategy, really; kind of like sticking yourself with a pin so you won’t feel so miserable about having the flu.