Scrub-A-Dub

Do you ever think back to when you were a child? Today I was transported in my thoughts through time and space- and into the bathtub at our old house. My brother and I were in there together, racing cars up down each others backs and doling out dramatic nautical deaths to the passengers of our toy boats. They should have known better than to navigate so close to the treacherous coast!

I don't think it occurred to either of us that a bathtub is meant for getting clean. Every time we hopped in the tub mom would toss a wash cloth at each of us with the soap and say, "Don't forget to scrub yourself at some point." We probably did, but I don't remember it. I do remember that the washcloths, when not being wasted on hygienic missions, made excellent bogs. They would float like an island on the water until an unsuspecting victim stepped out onto them. Then SHOOOP!!! down they'd go, like quicksand. Mwahahaha! Washcloths were also good for at least one water fight each bath.

When the summer Olympics were on my brother and I would each kidnap an unsuspecting Fischer-Price person and have diving competitions. The scoring was based on a combination of how many times they turned around in the air, how big a splash they made when they landed, and how much they clunked when they hit the bottom of the tub.

Probably our favorite bathtub activity was laying on our backs with our ears under the water. If you closed your eyes you were instantly transported into a parallel universe with bizarre hums and moans and whirrs. Only our flotilla of toys clanking endlessly against the sides of the tub reminded us where we were. We didn't like being reminded where we were, so we tossed the drippy things overboard (mom and dad could never quite understand how we managed to get all that water on the floor) and then tried to lay as quietly as possible in the tub.

This, of course, aroused the suspicion of our mother. No one was pleading with the sea monsters for his life. No one was getting all 6s and a 4.5 from the Russian judge. Surely something was amiss. So she would call through the door the line that she inherited from Eve, "Don't forget to wash behind your ears!" We would giggle, not so much because of all the parts on a little boy's body she was worried about the backsides of our ears, but because when we were listening underwater it sounded like she was talking through a toilet paper tube into a milkshake.

Sooner or later the dreaded would occur: the water would stagnate. Sometimes this would be a gradual thing. We had a rather leaky drain stopper and we helped it out at regular intervals to lower the tides, either to accomodate larger hurricanes without incurring parental hurricanes on account of the overflow, or to give us an excuse to add more hot water. But we could only add hot water so many times before the soap was completely diluted. Eventually the whole tub felt like it contained the nastiness that used to be on us. Sometimes, before my brother was potty-trained, the stagnation of the water would be much more sudden and jarring. We would be lying there on our backs, in our parallel universe, and suddenly I would realize that we had company.

All good things come to an end. Each of our baths did, and unfortunately close in chronology to our bed times. Kind of a double-whamy. I don't remember when our last bath together was. We eventually were lured into the concept of showers. You can sell a kid almost anything for the sake of novelty. What a rotten deal. Some people dream of mansions and cars and islands. For me, when I retire I hope I can go back to taking baths.