When Gary and I vacation, we tend to stay in timeshares. There are advantages to staying in timeshares – the most significant of which (for me, anyway) is that you can do your own cooking. As someone who loves to cook and is a Weight Watcher, that always works out well for me.

The downside, however, to doing your own cooking is that you also have to clean up, which to be frank, isn't such a big deal for me. I mean you just load the dishes, post and pans into the dishwasher and, bada bing, your work is done.

However, there are those rare occasions when the timeshare we're in doesn't have a dishwasher. Like the one we're in now. That's a bit of a hassle. Still, I like to keep order in the kitchen, so when Gary offered to do the dishes after dinner tonight, I turned him down. There were only a few to do, anyway, so it wasn't such a chore.

As I washed and watched the dishes go from dirty to clean, I had a flashback that made me cringe and chuckle.

According to a recent study by Clorox, men will wear certain articles of clothing – including their skivvies – multiple times before washing them. The study reported that men will do a sniff test on laundry day to determine whether or not to wash something. Y'know what? That's how I was raised, so I don't find that so incomprehensible – except maybe for the undergarments part.... 

In the kitchen, however, I am squeamish about cleanliness. Unlike some folks … .

When I lived in Israel, my then boyfriend Alexander had a roommate named Ken. He was friendly, relatively good looking and had a nasty habit. Instead of washing his dishes after using them, he'd put them back in the cupboard dirty. When I asked him why he didn't wash them, he said, “Well, I'm just going to use them again, so why should I bother washing them?" 

I suppose it will come as no surprise to learn that Ken was single. However, he had made it very clear that he was interested in finding a wife.

When I think about Ken, the first thing that springs to mind is a poem by Shel Silverstein called, aptly, “The Dirtiest Man in the World.”

I offer the final stanza of the poem to you now, Ken, wherever you may be. This follows the lengthy and detailed description from “Dirty Dan, the world's dirtiest man” of just how truly filthy he is: “I'd brighten my life if I just found a wife, but I fear that will never be. Until I can find a girl, gentle and kind, with a beautiful face and a sensitive mind, who sparkles and twinkles and glistens and shines – and who's almost as dirty as me.”