Some cultures have certain customs concerning the welcoming of guests into one's home. For instance, hosts in some cultures greet their guests with a series of embraces and salutations. In other cultures, hosts thoughtfully provide soft, appealing slippers for their guests to slip on after they have removed their shoes.
Joe and I welcome our guests -- infrequent as they are -- with blindfolds. This, believe it or not, is actually for their own good. Blindfolded, they are unable to see the chaos that reigns in certain parts of our house. A full view of our house would undoubtedly cause our visitors to shrink back against the door, fumble for the knob, and run back to their car or house in terror.
Of course, like any house there are areas of our dwelling that can be seen by guests. These make up about 1/2 % of the entire house. So we give our guests the tour in tandem, with one of us leading them by the hand so they do not fall down the treacherous stairways, and the other stopping occasionally to lift the blindfolds to point out some area of interest -- such as the dishwasher, which is very historic and always clean, because I insist on scrubbing dishes before putting them in the diswasher -- to the guests. If we come upon an area that would be particularly alarming if seen, Joe will deftly distract the guests by pointing out some other nearby feature in response to my frantic pantomime.
Our guests must also sign a nondisclosure cause, in which they promise -- on threat of being invited back, this time without a blindfold -- never to reveal what they have seen in our house, on the off chance that they observed something that might be incriminating to us.
The truth is that we keep putting people off who would like to come see our house (and, we hope, us) because it does not yet look quite how we envision it. But lately I have been reconsidering this policy. I am endeavoring to convince my policy co-sponsor that maybe now is the time to have people over, when their expectations are low. If we keep putting them off, promising that at some future -- very future -- time the visit will be worth the wait, the pressure will be on us to deliver. After all the buildup, they might come over and think, "We waited for this?" But if they come now, they are prepared for disappointment and can indulge in the hope that someday, we will offer them cozy slippers instead of a blindfold.
1 comment:
I fixed my problem (and I DO have one) early on in my married life, by greeting guests at the door with one statement and one statement only, (as I pompously held my head high),
"Enter at your own risk! It's clean enough to be healthy........ and dirty enough to be happy!"
It worked wonders.....it "weeded-out" a lot of poser-type-wanna-be friends. They had to like me dirt and all. Heck, on any given day when my babies were little, one was known to "stick" to my kitchen floor. (I was always able to set them free by the end of the day, however!)
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