Dave Wood

Until recently I was a clean guy. For years, for example, I had the routine of getting up at 6:30 a.m. to make my way to the local Y, where I was required to take a hot soapy shower before I could jump in the pool for my daily swim. With a shower and a swim, I spent every day as squeaky clean as you can get.

When that stretch of my life ended, we moved into a house with a walk-in-sit-down shower, where I loved to loll with the hand-held spray and uncorrupt every inch of my pudgy body.

I’d say that my enthusiasm for warm comfortable showers comes from the days when I was a kid growing up in Rat Coulee in Trempealeau County, where I was covered with scales six days of the week. Folks who lived in the town of Whitehall had bathtubs, but farmers had a kitchen sink with a slop pail underneath, where I washed my hands and face with a big bar of stinky Lifebuoy soap most days of the week. I don’t think I was smelly, but then who could tell, since I sat in school every day next to kids who had the same hygienic habits as me.

But we smelled good on Sunday, after the weekly Saturday night plunge. My mother would set up a big wash tub in the summer kitchen, where I stood naked and shivering while she poured water from the steaming cookstove reservoir into the galvanized tub. Then I would put a scaly toe into it and moan until mom yelled: “Don’t lollygag around until the water gets cold.” So I’d crawl in, wash a little until my skin took on the hue of a skinny lobster, and Mother would come back from listening to Frank Sinatra on the radio, scrub me behind the ears and toss me a towel, which I used to wipe off the sludge before it froze on me. Then I’d leave the tub to its next bather: my dad, whose 6-foot-2-inch frame usually caused the water level to exceed the capacity of the tub—not that I could witness that, since it would have been improper to see my dad naked.

At the present time, my hygienic habits might be even a little less effective than they were in those good old days. The thing is, I’ve broken two bones in my neck and I’m in a brace that resembles the armor that King Henry VIII wore into battle (probably more to pull in his girth than save his skin), only it’s plastic. It has a chest protector, a neck cup, and a back brace, all meant to hold me in one immovable place until the bones heal, which might be six weeks.

And bathing in the meantime? Well, none of this equipment can be removed, so you can guess what that means: sponge baths a little less thorough than the ones I took standing by the kitchen sink in Rat Coulee.

There is one consolation here: I’ve never been one who enjoys having visitors when I’m laid up. With the kind of hygiene I’m capable of right now, it seems unlikely that anyone will muster up the courage to face an encounter with me!