Harrumph!

I sing loud praise for shower baths!

After weeks of pouring water over my head out of and into a sink, and then washing and rinsing every accessible body part with a cloth, I showered. My surgical staples and Aircast had combined to keep me wet only one body part at a time.

The experience of running water everywhere was grand, cleansing figuratively inside as well as outside. Even though I had to sit in a lawn chair like the maimed guy I am, I feel I am returning to the natural order of modern life.

As so much does though, this dug deep into my childhood to return with a memory in its teeth. I knew a subset of people who had never showered and never even covered their faces with a wet washcloth. They bathed but feared water on their noses and mouth. In my innocence, I freed them.

The summer of my 13th birthday, we had moved from the bottom to the middle of Virginia. I was pressed into service teaching swimming — to a group of elderly never-been-swimmers. It worked.

I was taking both Advanced Swimmer and Junior Life Saving courses. I then had a couple of hours to swim and dive in the man-made lake before my mother picked me up. Coincidentally, she was the director of the Red Cross chapter and kind of the boss of the bosses of the swimming courses. That became important because my swimming instructor knew her as the efficient and responsible RC lady and me as her like-minded son.

She asked me flat out if I would try to make the group of eight or ten elderly beginners a little less fearful of the water. It turns that this WWI crowd grew up in times and places where they did not swim. Moreover, after I agreed to try, my students told me that they were afraid of water, particularly covering their faces. They had never had their heads under water, even in the bathtub.

Of course, I was both too comfortable in the water myself and too naive to consider failure, so I went ahead.

My mother had been a water-safety instructor for many years. I used the lesson books as recreational reading. Yet, there was little about the current problem. There was the Ben Franklin trick of dropping a hard boiled egg in the water and telling the fearful student to retrieve it. Most people were willing to perform a narrow task like that and would bob quickly to do it. That not only gave them some confidence, but it got them to look underwater and got them ready to float.

We all seemed comfortable with each other. I was a nice young kid who had grown up around RC volunteers, many of whom were elderly. Most of those insisted after knowing me for awhile that I call them by their first names as well. I was not shy around people as old or older than my grandparents.

The short of it is that it worked far better than my swimming instructor anticipated. We splashed water on our faces and worked up to blowing bubbles with our faces in the water. They grabbed white objects in waist-deep water. They learned to float with kickboards and then do that with their faces down between their arms.

I was absolutely not prepared for the excitement that ensued. To a one, they were delighted. They said thing like it was a whole new element. A couple said it was like they had learned to fly. They felt liberated. They were very pleased with themselves.

If I could teach people something that made them feel that way, I would have loved to made a career of that. The contagious joy of that group was extraordinarily sweet and powerful.

I hadn’t thought of that summer in quite awhile. Today, sitting in the lawn chair shampooing and scrubbing away, I found that their faces and words returned. What is a simple empowerment to others may deeply satisfy us.

I sing in praise of showers.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, bathing, water