Brave Companions of the Shower

The lives and passing of little plastic containers

This is absolutely NOT my shower. I wish it was, though.

Every morning, I take a shower. This is important.

We all have our own ways of getting up. My wife bounces out of bed turned up to 11, full of schemes and plans, probably having already emailed several people. I, shall we say, do not. My emergence is more like that of a person awakened from PermaSleep near the end of some epic journey between the stars, or being reincarnated after a rocky period in the afterlife. I have vague impressions of who I was the day before, but quite some distance to travel before I regain that state. The shower is the portal.

I will drink several cups of strong tea beforehand. This acts like those fast-motion films you see of arid lands responding to the eventual coming of spring rains, except not in fast-motion. I will also attend to urgent emails, which is why some of them probably read as if they were output by a shakily-trained AI.

Then, after moodily shaving, I shall enter the portal.

Don’t worry — I’m not going to give you a fine-grained account of my activities during the subsequent minutes. Nobody needs that. But what did strike me this morning was the relationships I have to the unguents in there. There are two.

Shampoo, and body wash.

My wife’s containers are consistent. Either she has the sense — or cares enough — to buy the same thing each time; or they’re responsibly doled out of some massive uber-unguent stock kept under lock and key in the garage. There are other devices of hers that always seem to be present, like a blue plastic anemone-like thing which I assume has some buffing or polishing role in her physical maintenance practices.

I tend to piggy-back off her shampoo. My hair is not of a sufficiently tightly-specified type to require or deserve some special formula. It is, basically, simply my hair. I keep it on my head. On Monday, Wednesday and Fridays, I wash my hair with some of whatever brand currently enjoys Paula’s loyalty. Why on those days? So when I lurch into the shower I have an easy way of determining whether I did it yesterday, or not. My brain is truly still at reboot stage at this point, and the software for remembering whether I washed my hair the day before has not yet been loaded into RAM.

That done, it’s body wash time — and this was what started me writing. I’m not sure I’ve ever had the same body wash twice in a row.

Paula usually does: hers is hand-crafted by elves according to a combination of ancient spells and the latest modern science, which is why she still looks like a bright young thing, whereas in a bad light I appear to have been recently, and inexpertly, exhumed. I will have grabbed whatever looked okay last time I was in CVS or Safeway and remembered that I needed some. This will always have been a couple of days after I actually needed some, provoking a few showers in which I’ve wearily had to take the top off the current container and swish water around to get the dregs.

(Just to reassure you that I’m not some kind of walking pigsty, I do also shower or bathe at the end of every single working day, and I’m a writer who often only leaves the house if we’ve run out of beer, so it’s not like I’m caked in layers of mud all the time. I seem to use bathing as a kind of boundary or transition between different chunks of the day, to wife and child’s bafflement, and mutterings of “But you haven’t even left the house.” Anyway).

Whatever stuff I’ve bought will then be my companion in the shower for a couple of months. Something I recognize every morning, use, put back — and then don’t think of for a nanosecond until the same point in the procedure the following day. But then I do fuzzily think “Ah, hello, good morning… going to use a bit of you again.” Then it’s returned to its place, to be recognized again tomorrow.

Finally it’ll be empty, and there will come the morning when its time is up.

Today was one of those mornings. The bottle of Aveda wash was absolutely done (unusually upmarket for me, a gift), and a random replacement from CVS was waiting in the wings. No longer my brave compadre, the Aveda had morphed overnight into an empty piece of plastic that needed to be disposed of.

The RandoWash now sits in its place, looking different, glancing around, getting to know the neighbors, possibly coming across as a little over-confident and (literally) full of itself. The blue plastic anemone-like thing is polite to it, though with the restraint of something that’s seen male shower washes come, and watched them go, while it remains there eternally, safe in the knowledge that it performs some bizarre function or other, a valued servant of the woman of the house. The shampoo nods briskly in RandoWash’s direction, also secure in the longevity of its status (thankfully unaware that at some point, be it months or years from now, it may be abruptly replaced by some sparkly new product that has actual gold in it or something). Paula’s shampoo doesn’t waste time on frivolities. It’s a pro.

The human shuts the shower door, gets dressed, and then leaves. The light goes out, and the unguents stand in silence, in readiness for the next battle, the next time when they are the sole focus of human intention, building the bridge from sleep to awake.

Meanwhile I take the plastic Aveda container out of the room and put it in the recycling. Farewell, old friend. Thank you for the good times, the clean times.

For being there.