Shelb Eliz

As a dishwasher I spent my shifts yanking trays off a conveyor belt and feeding their contents into an enormous, foul mouthed machine that roared and spat until its charges, free of congealed fat and gravy, came steaming out the other end, fogging my glasses and filling the air with the harsh smell of chlorine. I didn't care for the heat or the noise, but other than that, I enjoyed my job. The work kept my hands busy but left my mind free to concentrate on more important matters. Sometimes i would study from the list of irregular Spanish verbs i kept posted over the sink, but most often I found myself fantasizing about a career in television. It was my dream to create and star in a program called "Socrates and Company,' in which I would travel from place to place accompanied by a brilliant and loyal proboscis monkey. Socrates and I wouldn't go looking for trouble, but week after week it would manage to find us. "The eyes, Socrates, go for the eyes," I'd yell during one of our many fight scenes. Maybe in Santa Fe I'd be hit over the head by a heavy jug and lose my memory. Somewhere in Utah Socrates might discover a satchel of valuable coins or befriend someone wearing a turban, but at the end of every show we would realize that true happiness often lies where you very least expect it. It might arrive in form of a gentle breeze or a handful of peanuts, but when it came, we would seize it with our own brand of folksy wisdom. I'd planned it so that the final moments of each episode would find Socrates and me standing before a brilliant sunset as I reminded both my friend and the viewing audience of the lesson I had learned. "It suddenly occurred to me that there are things far more valuable than gold," I might say, watching a hawk glide high above a violet butte. Plotting the episodes was no more difficult than sorting the silverware; the hard part was thinking up the all-important revelation. "it suddenly occurred to me that..." That what? Things hardly ever occurred to me. It might occasionally strike me that I'd broken a glass or filled the machine with too much detergent, but the larger issues tended to elude me.