Ode To The Kitchen Sink

Unraveling the Mysteries of the ADHD Mind

If you’ve never thought seriously about your kitchen sink, obviously you don’t have ADHD. People who have ADHD think all the time about everything including things as mundane as kitchen sinks.

We move seamlessly from raging overwhelm which can only be cured by a nap to creativity bordering on insanity. We try to dampen our enthusiasm and not discuss everything that’s on our minds with friends and family. It drives them crazy.

We excel at making connections between seemingly unrelated topics. This also drives our friends and family crazy.

We’ve spent years trying to learn not to interrupt conversations with something that “just popped up” and has nothing to do with the conversation. We still make mistakes.

We know we made a mistake when the other person says “Huh? What are you talking about?” (Wondering about ADHD? Check out Oh Look, There’s a Squirrel and Is Internet ADHD Rocking Your Biz?)

Trying to Tell the Story of J. S. Bach’s Picture

By the way, did I every tell you the story about the famous portrait of my favorite composer, Johann Sebastian Bach?

Good grief, how did I get from kitchen sinks to Bach? Goes like this: so I mentioned how making weird connections and blathering on about them can drive family members crazy.

Then I remembered how I bored a music teacher during a reception at a granddaughter’s school.

But hey, it’s a great story so I might as well tell it before I get on with kitchen sinks.

My son Stephen and I had just attended the Christmas Nine Lessons and Carols service at Groton School. Abby, my granddaughter, had job of ringing the bells from the chapel steeple.

We wandered over to the Headmaster’s house for the family and friends reception and to wait for Abby. We ran into one of the music teachers and chatted briefly.

Then, for no reason, I started telling him the history of Elias Gottlob Haussmann’s famous portrait of Bach, completed in 1748, two years before Bach’s death. The portrait called The Face of Bach.

He took a sip of wine, a bite of cookie, said “nice to meet you,” and wandered away . . . in the middle of my story!

Stephen commented, “Mom you know the weirdest stuff.”

I replied that I’d learned this “weird” story from John Eliot Gardiner’s biograpy: Bach, Music in the Castle of Heaven. And that Stephen had given me this book for Christmas the year before.

Gardiner, founder and conductor of the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists, has recorded over 250 albums including the 198 sacred cantatas of Bach which have been found. Approximately 100 additional cantatas are missing.

But now aren’t you curious about this story?

The Face of Bach

The Haussmann Bach portrait, worth 2.5 million dollars, was discovered in a curiosity shop in Breslau by the Jenke family in the 1820s. In 1936, William Jenke, a Jewish music teacher, fled Germany for England, taking the portrait with him.

Fearing it would be damaged before Jenke could find a home for himself, he asked his friends the Gardiners to keep it at their country home in Dorset and away from the air raids in London.

Gardiner would gaze at Bach staring down at him from the landing as he went upstairs to bed every night. Bach seemed stern and forbidding to the young boy.

At the end of The War, Jenke retrieved the portrait from the Gardiners. In 1952 he sold it at an auction. William Scheide, an American philanthropist, musicologist, and Bach scholar in Princeton, NJ, purchased it.

After Scheide’s death at the age of 100, the portrait hung briefly in the Princeton University Museum for public viewing. Scheide had directed in his will that the portrait be given to the Bach Museum in Leipzig.

Bach had lived in Leipzig and worked at the St. Thomas Kirche when he composed the 300 sacred cantatas. The portrait would finally be back home.

We moved temporarily to NJ the same year the University shipped the portrait from America back to Germany. I missed seeing The Face of Bach by three days.

But I do have a postcard-size copy of the portrait framed and sitting on the bookcase next to my desk.

I also have a book bag with the portrait on the front and the back. I take it on airplanes as a carry-on bag. I take it shopping to avoid plastic bags.

Once a woman standing in line next to me remarked “Oh cute. It’s Beethoven.”

Shocked, I replied, “No, it’s Bach!” I wanted to add “And he’s not cute, and you’re an idiot!” I bit my tongue.

I refrained from launching into the story of the The Face of Bach. We were in a line long enough to tell the story. But if Abby’s music teacher, who certainly knew the difference between Bach and Beethoven, had walked away, this woman certainly wouldn’t have appreciated the story.

Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. It’s all the same: three old dead composers who were born in Germany and whose names start with B.

Another framed Bach postcard hangs in the kitchen across from the kitchen sink: a kitten peering over the music of Bach’s “Invention in F major.” (A piece I played, badly, on the piano as a child.)

My Life with Kitchen Sinks

Now, where was I? Oh right, Bach, kitten, piano music, kitchen, sink. I was writing about kitchen sinks before I got distracted.

People with ADHD often get distracted. I hope it didn’t cause you to stop reading like Abby’s music teacher who walked away.

While rewriting the introduction to this book for the third time, I was thinking about how to describe what’s in the book. How about 37 chapters covering “everything but the kitchen sink”? Never mind, that’s a trite cliche.

Before I could think of something more clever, I started thinking about . . . kitchen sinks. I was amazed at how many stories I could remember about kitchen sinks I have known and used.

My earliest memory is dying Easter eggs the day after my Mother put up new curtains above the kitchen sink. The directions said “drop the hard boiled eggs into the cups with the Easter egg dye.” The directions did not say “gently place the eggs into the cups.”

I dropped the eggs. The eggs splatted Easter egg dye all over my Mother’s new curtains. The dye never washed out. My Mother was not pleased!

Or the time my cousin Bill and I were sitting at the kitchen table and instead of eating lunch, we thought playing basketball would be more fun. We each wadded up our paper napkin and threw it wildly in the direction of the kitchen sink.

But one paper napkin wasn’t enough for a full game of basketball. We managed to go through lots of paper napkins before my mother discovered the kitchen floor covered with paper napkins that never made it to the kitchen sink. Again, she was not pleased.

Nor was she pleased if she thought that my friend Sharra and I had taken a Pepsi and a tray of ice cubes out of the fridge and hadn’t refilled the ice cube tray with water.

“Girls, don’t forget to go to the sink and put water in the ice cube tray,” she would yell from some far corner of the house. How did she even know what we were doing?

Once, I used the kitchen sink to wash dog poop off my left shoe. It’s probably not necessary to mention that my Mother was not pleased!

“Do not stack your breakfast dishes or your lunch dishes or your dinner dishes in the kitchen sink. Rinse them and put them carefully in the dishwasher.” My Mother repeated this rule many times. I’m a slow learner.

My friend Gail stayed with some friends in England. Next to their kitchen sink were two towels: one for dishes, one for hands. It seemed odd to her. I reported that two towels was the law in my house and the houses of my aunts and my grandmother. I thought one towel was odd.

She thought two towels was odd. Her Mother and aunts and grandmother didn’t do two towels. It’s odd indeed how we all assume the way in which our mothers and aunts and grandmothers did things is the only way.

It was our first Thanksgiving dinner. Our first time having company. My husband, a graduate student at Yale, and I lived in a 3rd floor apartment of an old house. We invited as many friends as would fit around our small table.

We didn’t have a car so got our downstairs neighbors to drive us to the grocery store. Bought a cheap roasting pan and a turkey plus everything else one eats at such a dinner, including frozen peas.

The oven was small. The turkey was big. We bent the cheap roasting pan around the turkey in order to get it in the oven.

When we removed the turkey from the oven, the cheap glazing on the pan had crumbled off, lying in the bottom of the pan and all over the aluminum foil covering the bird.

We rescued the turkey from this mess. And instead of putting the roasting pan in the kitchen sink to soak, it went into the trash.

Time to eat. The last item on the menu, the frozen peas, were done.

Standing at the kitchen sink ready to drain the water off the peas, I turned to listen to what one of our friends was saying.

Without paying attention, I took the lid off the peas, dumping the saucepan of peas into the sink. I don’t remember whether we ate them or not. If we did, no one was poisoned.

Or when you think you may never get your hand back out of the sink drain as you try to retrieve a cherished item that fell in the sink and could soon be devoured by the garbage disposal. I have large hands. I have scraped my hands during this activity.

Sinks work for giving a baby a bath. Sinks work for giving a kitten a bath who hasn’t learned yet to give himself a bath. Our kitten Rabbie liked it when Eric gave him a bath. His sister Mitzi, not so much. But she was older and had mastered bathing herself.

Sinks work well for brushing your teeth if you only have one bathroom and someone is using it and you’re going to be late. That was true at my Grandmother’s house where I spent much of my childhood.

Sinks are good for hooking up what Stephen called the “Mobile Maid” — the dishwasher that isn’t hooked up to it’s own water connection.

However, it’s a nuisance when you forget to put water in the coffee pot before hooking up the Mobile Maid. Now you have to fill the coffee pot with water from the bathroom sink. A bigger nuisance if someone is in the bathroom. (Check out a story about a malfunctioning coffee pot here.)

And there’s a second story about a Thanksgiving-dinner-with-company in which the kitchen sink played a major role.

One needs to be careful while cleaning and cutting up vegetables over the kitchen sink. If you accidentally try cutting off your finger instead of the ends of the broccoli, blood may appear on the vegetables in the sink.

Eric was not pleased at having to take his wife to the Emergency Room on a holiday with company coming. Not that taking a family member to the ER is ever a pleasant activity. My Mother wasn’t pleased either when she arrived for the feast and saw my finger with a bandage.

If I have anything against sinks, it’s against those who manufacture them. Someone assumed many years ago that only short people use kitchen sinks. They were wrong.

Wrapping It All Up

Now you know the weird ways the ADHD mind works and you’ve experienced it as I moved from fretting about the introduction for my book, Oh Look . . . There’s a Squirrel to the history of Elias Gottlob Haussmmann’s portrait of Bach.

Then on to my experiences, totally unrelated to Bach, with kitchen sinks and my Mother’s reactions to some of those experiences, not to mention calamities preceding two Thanksgiving dinners.

Did I tell you that Bach is my favorite composer?

I love Bach so much that I played Bach on the piano (badly) and sang Bach in a choir (without falling off the risers).