Let’s Talk! – Common As Mud

I wasn’t sure when I found this topic to be the next to be pondered in my friend Tyrean Martinson’s book about writing prompts. To be honest, the first thought I came up with were the mudflats around Willapa Bay. They are numerous, and I have never seen anything like them before. They would probably suck you under if you tried to walk across. Heavy, dark, treacherous mud that is covered when the tide moves in again.

I wondered whether I had my idiom right that came to my mind next, and I found it was “common as muck” in American English and “common as dirt” in British English. It is the definition for unsophisticated, lower-class people with a penchant for the vulgar. Oh my, that sounds awfully negative, doesn’t it?! And it puts the person who talks about people that way into a place I wouldn’t want to be in either – that of a snob who doesn’t even try to look behind the façade and might be surprised to find an honest worker with a heart of gold behind the rough shell. It hadn’t even occurred to me that somebody would compare a person to dirt. I had supposed it meant something in similar abundance! Such as in “apples are as common as dirt in Washington State” – meaning you find them everywhere. On the other hand, that doesn’t sound right to me either. Nobody and nothing should be compared to dirt, something that we all dread and try to get rid of.

Then it struck me that my friend might have sneaked in another sophisticated line of poetry, and – lo, and behold! – there is precisely the wording “common as mud” in the poem To Be Of Use by Marge Piercy. (If you want to read it, here’s the link: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57673/to-be-of-use .) “The work of the world is common as mud”, she writes, a former working-class girl herself, and she describes how lowly some work is and how she admires the matter-of-factness with which people tackle their tasks and become part of it, producing something useful. They become part of the task nobody else wants to accomplish but the result of which is in demand.

Now, maybe the wording muck or mud doesn’t matter, but I can relate with this angle exactly. How often do I think of tasks that are done on a daily basis by people who earn their livelihood with them, tasks that involve nastiness or danger, sweat and odors, maybe even a mindset of stoicism even if they wouldn’t use this term? Do we see them? As people?

When I was a kid, our garbage men in my native town were all so-called guestworkers from Southern Europe. They rode at the back of the garbage trucks, dressed in bright orange, holding on to a handle, the eternal stink of the truck’s belly in their noses. They barely spoke German. Even as a child I wondered what they would do after hours. No doubt, they’d clean up. They would then sit with their family, tired after a day’s hard work, in apartments in town areas that seemed to be reserved for “such people”. Poorer areas, where the smells of foreign food hung in the air and the language children spoke when they were playing with each other was not mine. The muck the parent dealt with was not the person. Their task was for the benefit of others. They even smiled at us children, who were fascinated with what skill they were rolling the heavy stinking bins, never seeming to mind what they were doing. Like a prolonged arm of the garbage truck. But … people.

Common as mud, common as muck, common as dirt … So many who aren’t seen for who they are but for the seeming lowliness of their task … I will eat my dinner very humbly tonight, thinking of all the people who have been involved in providing me with my creature comforts.