"Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation."
--- Ben Franklin on Cleanliness
Other than point out that in Benjamin Franklin's time they spelled clothes differently, his description of Cleanliness seems very straightforward.
Certainly, Mom and Dad instilled this virtue within my sister and me through example. Mom took a bath upon rising, and Dad shaved and then showered every morning. After breakfast, they brushed their teeth, combed hair and put on clean clothes.
Darlene and I were expected to follow suit, though bathing was a nighttime rather than morning activity in our early years. Of course, we all brushed our teeth before bed.
Mom did laundry regularly, so there were always clean clothes hanging in the closets or folded neatly in drawers from which daily wear was selected.
As a hairdresser, Dad didn't wear suits on a daily basis, but his suits and French-cuffed dress shirts were dry-cleaned to be ready when needed. He looked very dapper for making Amway presentations to his downline network working weekend evenings.
Mom always wore attractive, fashionable clothes with accessories like scarves and jewelry, which I guess isn't exactly cleanliness but always made me proud when she would work at the school library or act as the "room mother" for my class. I remember a little girl in my second grade class saying, "Your mother is so beautiful." Now to a great extent that was Mom's loving smile and beaming countenance, but her well-pressed, immaculately clean clothing played into that.
What is not so obvious to those of us living in a time of hot and cold running water from bathroom taps, modern washers and dryers in our own homes, modern plumbing and sewage systems, regular garbage collection and modest energy prices to make it all accessible to the average American in the late 20th through early 21st Century is that it wasn't always this way.
Going back just as far as my parents' childhood, none of these items could be taken for granted. Wealthy people like Mark Twain might have had access to early versions of modern amenities in the late 1800's, but my mother was born in a house without indoor plumbing. Baths took place in a wash tub on the back porch, filled with water hand-pumped from a well and heated on a wood-burning stove. That same wash tub was used by Grandmother to do laundry on the farm where work clothes got quite soiled with dirt and sweat.
Despite those hindrances, Mom's family was always neat, clean and tidy when not working in the fields, and even there at least early in the morning.
Back in Ben Franklin's time, bathing weekly would have been excessive for a pioneer living on the frontier. If you're as old as me, you remember cowboys going into bath houses after a long dusty ride to get cleaned up, or perhaps Jim Backus as anold prospector in a Gilligan's Island fantasy, "I haven't had a bath in fifty years!" Everyone within sniffing range replied, "I know."
I doubt Benjamin Franklin bathed only once every thirteen weeks, but perhaps as someone with many diverse projects and hobbies, he required an occasional reminder to tidy up. He certainly couldn't run a successful print shop without keeping it regularly cleaned. As mentioned before, individual letters needed to be placed back in the proper section, presumably clean and ready for re-use, or be "out of sorts." Orderliness is a form of cleanliness. Just ask a mom who sees toys strewn all over her son's floor.
In 1778, Franklin's contemporary John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, said in a sermon, "Cleanliness is next to Godliness." Maybe so, but cleanliness also has compound positive impacts on our wellness. The recent commands to wash hands every time we step outside of our homes may be overdone in this Covid-age, but most of us understand that washing hands before meals and washing our dinnerware rather than leaving it out for bugs and vermin to feed on just makes sense for good health.
It should be obvious --- but I will point out for those who don't appreciate what it is to be a member of Western Civilization --- that much of the world does not have this same access to modern technology, clean water and affordable power, so the challenges of cleanliness with naturally accruing health benefits attributed to living in a sanitary environment are considerably greater. Lugging clay jugs to a distant water source and returning with considerably heavier filled jugs. Boiling it over fire to purify it of naturally-occuring bacteria, but only after making a fire with dung as the fuel. It's not the glamorous world some back-to-nature types seem to believe.
In any case, I managed to stretch this obvious topic of Cleanliness into a page of copy to accompany photos of our wonderful Christmas at the very clean home of my sister, brother-in-law and nephew. Darlene made three huge dinners while we were staying with her, including a perfect Christmas dinner, with all the dirty pots, pans and dishes that entails, but after the meal, soon everything was neat and tidy again.
Allow me to share a few details of that Christmas dinner, which was truly exceptional. To accompany the succulunt ham, Darlene made special sweet potatoes lended with bananas, oranges and spices, then topped with Alabama pecan pieces. That was the best ham side dish ever. King's Hawaiian rolls, scalloped potatoes, delicious salad with some kind of spicy dressing, asparagus and other items made it quite a feast.
For dessert, we each received a little "Glückschwein," a Marzipan Pig that is considered good luck for the New Year and may be the start of a new tradition for us. Marzipan tastes a lot like almond cookies we used to get along with a fortune cookie at Lichee, a Chinese restaurant in Westminster where our childhood family would get quite dressed up, with Dad in a suit and Mom dressed to the nines, for an occasional Sunday family meal.
Darlene also made a Tres Leches cake, which only Billy, her hairdresser friend who joined us for the meal, was ready to eat immediately following the huge meal.
Billy has joined us for family gatherings in the past. He's a nice man who has no surviving family members. As someone who worked years as a hairdresser herself, Darlene has a special place in her heart for people in that profession like Billy. To some extent, he reminds me of Lowry, who worked at our dad's hair salon in Belmont Shores and painted the neo-Impressionist "Shady Brook," which hangs at the end of our hallway in our Redondo condo.
In this era where Billy's way to earn his livelihood in a salon has been jerked away by bureaucrats whose own lifestyles and incomes proceed unabated, his presence was a poignant reminder for Darlene and me of how this California shutdown of businesses would have crushed our own happy family had such Draconian responses to a virus occurred when we were children dependent on Dad's hair salon for our idyllic life in Westminster. One year like this could have destroyed our family life for a decade.
As it is, our family certainly has come through this pandemic only slightly inconvenienced and in terms of flexible work schedules better off, but many small businesses have been destroyed. We are grateful to have been spared, but none of us should forget that when politicians say sacrifices must be made, they rarely do anything themselves other than take a bow for making "brave decisions," totally oblivious to the devastation they cause by overreacting with measures that may have no more effectiveness than a pagan sacrificing a virgin to appease a volcano.
In another industry close to my heart, cruising and travel, Cleanliness has always been a key foundation of operations at all times. In this Covid-era, cruise lines have stepped up to increase sanitation efforts, so cruising is now safer than ever.
As someone who made several transatlantic voyages himself and loved technology, Benjamin Franklin would love modern cruise ships.
It's truly amazing how far sea travel has advanced from Franklin's time, much less since European explorers like Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo sailed small, primative ships dependent on winds to distant shores, including San Diego, where Julie and I enjoyed a stroll through Cabrillo National Monument one morning in Point Loma.
More to the point, Benjamin Franklin would be amazed by sanitation technology utilized by cruise lines in response to the Covid pandemic. It takes Cleanliness a quantum leap higher.
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