I make no bones about my relationship with my car: we are close, very close, perhaps as close as two individuals can be when one is animate and the other is in-. But on a working level, my closest tie to a Major Appliance is to my washing machine. I have a hate-hate relationship with my stove; a fridge is just a fridge; the dishwasher hasn't worked since, oh, I think it was 1990; and as for the dryer, I'd sooner put laundry out on the line. But the washing machine and I are closely bonded. We do a lot together.

So it was, the other day, that I heaved all the dirty stuff down the back stairs, sorted it roughly into piles, and started chugging the stuff through The Process. I was in a hurry; it was a potential line-drying day (not many of those left before winter!) and I wanted to get the laundry out early. I bundled in the first load, tipped in the soap, spun the dial around--and suddenly froze in sheer bestartlement.

There on the dial, inbetween the COTTONS program (kids' clothes, socks, jeans and sweatshirts) and the KNITS program (sweaters, skirts, good slacks, underwear) there existed a program called PERM PRESS. I peered at it, bewildered. Jeez, I don't remember that... For a wild second, I thought that somehow it had snuck in on its own while my back was turned, nudging apart my beloved COTTONS and familiar KNITS--an interloper on the dial. Then I remembered vaguely having noticed it when I got the washer, six or seven years ago. I didn't use that program because I don't sort out laundry that way, and over time I'd simply stopped seeing that the program existed. But it had been there all along, tucked between the two programs I do use.

That got me looking around the other appliances with a certain white-eyed trepidation: any other little surprises out there, folks? I even checked the car, just to make sure.... There was, in fact, a program on the dryer I never use and had sort of forgotten about, but I hadn't blanked it out as thoroughly as I'd rubbed PERM PRESS from the blackboard of my mind. Other than that, and other than a button on the car radio that I don't have a clue about (irrelevant, anyway, since the radio's bust) all seemed familiar and peaceful.

It's funny: we get blind spots about things. I'm particularly good at getting blind spots about mess; certain piles of detritus simply disappear from my mental screen. I can stare at them, the way I'd "seen" PERM PRESS for years, without registering them. It's not that I'm staring at them and ignoring them. It's that I'm not seeing them at all. I'm not even aware that there's a discontinuity in the space-time continuum caused by their occupying a piece of this world, any more than I was aware that a chunk of my washing machine's program dial was occupied by PERM PRESS. My blindness was so complete, I didn't even know I was blind. I was blind to my blindness.

And then it struck me, with a sort of inner squirm of discomfortableness, that we can do the same thing about people... It's easiest when people are either very close to us or very distant from us. I suppose that's how some city people get used to panhandlers and street people--by this sort of blindness, an obliviousness so complete that they don't even register that these unfortunates are occupying space and time. (We can't do this out here in the boonies.)

But more dangerously, we're apt to do this to people who are close to us--to the people we should be committed to see most fully and love most completely. I've known a number of marriages in which one partner was blind to the reality of the other partner's real existence. That is, Barney (of course!) knows that Sylvia exists, in that she's sat across the breakfast table from him morning after morning for the last 23 years. But Barney has no more notion that Sylvia is a real person, as real as Barney himself is, than I had that PERM PRESS was sitting there between COTTONS and KNITS. Barney could not describe Sylvia to a stranger. He keeps her waiting the way he'd never keep a friend or acquaintance waiting. He visits his frustrations on her as though she were a piece of wood. She has no real needs, no real individuality, no personality of her own for him: she is the Sylvia-thing that serves his comfort (or fails to serve his comfort). To Barney, she's an It, not Sylvia. He is aware of her presence next to him in bed night after night, but not of what goes on in her heart and mind: what dreams she has, what needs she feels. She exists for him, but not for herself.

Whereas to God, Sylvia is a soul absolutely unlike any other soul in the world, infinitely precious, treasured and seen with deep awareness, a mixture of delight and pain. To God, Sylvia is fully *Sylvia*, each and every detail of her known intimately and seen with such compassion. Where she is damaged or wrong, God hurts for her, an ache that pangs the universe; where she is whole and healthy, God rejoices in her and the angels in heaven laugh. But above all, Sylvia is to God not an It, but a beloved Thou.

I've seen the same distortion in the relationship between parents and children. Of course our children tend to take us for granted --that's normal, although it's also something we children should outgrow. Part of becoming a grownup is to see your parents not just as your parents, but as individual human beings--although it's astonishing how many people never manage this. But parents often don't see their children as being individuals, independent entities. A "chip off the old block" is a thing, not a person: an It, not a Thou.

Oy. This is uncomfortable stuff. Do I do this to my own children? Or can I maintain the deeper discomfort of knowing that I don't truly know them--that they have an existence that I can't (and shouldn't) penetrate too far? They aren't just my children; they are their own and God's souls. The soul's fundamentally a mystery, only known (as all mysteries are only known) to God. But at least we can be aware that the mystery is there, and that there is infinite value and beauty in its depths and furthest reaches.

Think of that when you look across the breakfast table at the person on the other side, or tuck a child into bed, or argue with a teenager, or pass a panhandler, or get stuck in a traffic jam, or have any encounter with other souls near or far: that each is as precious to God as you are, that each is as fully an individual as you are--and that you have no idea who that individual is. We all have to love as best we can without ever quite knowing who it is we love. But that's true of ourselves too. What in my own self am I as blind to as I was to PERM PRESS?

Today is fine. I think I can probably get sheets out on the line to dry, for all the air is cool and the sun's thin; there's a breeze, and that helps. It would be good to toss sheets on the line and pin them out, and it might be the last time until next spring. And maybe this time, I'll see what PERM PRESS actually does.