Short Stories From 10 Years Ago – January 1, 2004
Old Pictures & The Bath
Short Stories From 10 Years Ago – January 1, 2004. After returning from, what turned out to be a wonderful New Year’s Eve celebration with family and friends, I stayed up until 4:00 A.M watching the film “Howard’s End”, based on the brilliant E.M. Forester novel of the same name. My reading group, The Moby Dick Book Club, is reading it as our February selection, and I’ve jumped the gun in readiness and almost finished said tome. I’m very pleased with myself. It’s ten o’clock in the morning and I needed to shower and meet friends for our annual New Year’s Day brunch at Rhodes restaurant at Yonge and St. Clair.
Not only was a personal cleansing in order, but I also needed to look after my beloved dog Augie and my wretched, grey cat Ziggy (the little streak of misery) known collectively and affectionately as ‘The Alphabet Boys’. While said furry beasts munched happily in the kitchen, I had time to take my morning shower. I stripped down to the bare essentials and stepped into the shower. Warm water cascaded over my head. I thought what the heck, it’s the first day of the new year, I have time for a bath. I depressed the bath tub stopper, and reversed the diverter. The tub started to fill and I sank down into the water. ‘The Bath’- especially the warm bath – can there be anything more soothing? Perhaps a cup of tea, when fingers and toes are almost frozen from a nippy winter outing!
I was still somewhat emotional about last night’s moment of ‘bed reverence’. And I thought, as I felt the water cover my legs, that another moment of divine intervention might be on the way. I immediately thought, oh please don’t let me become one of these preachy prigs, blathering on about my personal, spiritual experiences, about which no one gives a flying fig. But I couldn’t help it. I gazed at the ceiling and once again felt quite over-whelmed. I was refreshed, warm, comforted, safe and I had an inexplicable moment of bliss. What was happening to me?
As I lay there, my gaze wandered over to the wall beside the mirror, where on Boxing Day, I’d hung 2 pictures that my brother and his wife gave me for Christmas. One is of my brothers and me as little children. I suspect that I’m about 3. I had just given myself a loopy haircut in a moment of scissors rapture and my bangs were about a half inch long. Eric, my older brother might be 6 and Mike, 4. We three are sitting on a worn, Victorian sofa in the living room of our family home, wearing hand-me down clothes and scuffed boots. We’re each clutching a wide-eyed cat, who wants nothing more than to escape our fierce clutches. Eric is “snuffling’ his puddy, a behaviour which he still engages in today. For those of you not familiar with the ‘puddy snuffle’ – it occurs when the nose of the cat and the nose of the human are in direct contact. The cat must then look the person right in the eye and cats don’t like to do that – hence the need to escape at the first possible opportunity. The puddy struggle for freedom always follows the puddy snuffle.
The other picture is of me. I was still 3 and this time I was sitting on a swing that is in motion, my little hands wrapped tightly around the ropes. It’s probably November. There wasn’t much snow, but it was dull and grey. I’m glancing to one side and I have the first glimmer of a secret smile on my face. As sure as I am that 7 comes right after 6, I know why I was smiling. I was dressed in my little chocolate brown snow suit and my zip-up galoshes. I loved that outfit as a child. In fact, I adored that little suit so much that for the entire year in which I was 3, rain or shine – winter or summer, I put it on every day. It was a ritual. I got fully dressed at quarter to twelve every morning and waited on the front step for my Dad to arrive for lunch. He would come home, scoop me up in his arms and carry me into the kitchen. Once he’d had lunch and left for work, I happily relinquished my brown jacket and matching jodhpurs and did whatever 3 year olds in my neighbourhood did with their afternoons. A little nap, a little snack and a lot of Mommie.
As I looked at that picture of myself, I thought what a fortunate little child I’d been. Loved, safe, happy, provided for and full of promise. A life in waiting. And I thought of all the times in the intervening years when I had wasted time and energy in the relentless pursuit of ‘poor me’ or the even more plaintiff and pathetic “I can’t”. That didn’t work out, so and so didn’t love me, I didn’t have a new outfit for an evening out, my friends had better cars, vacations, houses and careers than I had. My thighs weren’t thin enough – my hips were too broad – my hair should be thicker and my nails longer – and on and on and on it went. How absurd we humans in general, and I in particular, can be. As I looked at my picture, I thought to myself, how much, in this new year, I wanted to set aside this self-pitying, time wasting behaviour. I have unwisely squandered some of my life’s mornings and I owed it to that little girl in the brown velvet snow suit to become all that I can be in the afternoon of my life.
If you are ever wondering what to buy your friends for a birthday or special occasion, give them a framed picture from their past. The thoughts that follow and the memories they evoke may be deliciously astonishing or even life altering. Now you see my problem. I’ve had a moment of ‘bath reverence’. Where will this end?
