You
know when you want to tell someone about an article that you read in
the New Yorker, and you start by saying, “There was a
long article in the New Yorker recently....” ? After a while
you realize that you always say long article, and the
truth is all the articles in the New Yorker are long
– so the adjective is redundant. (And this is not to complain about
the New Yorker articles – I love them. But I do confess that
I did not renew my subscription this year because the price went up
to $99 which is beyond my budget, sigh.)
So
I was about to start this blog post with the phrase “there was a
guy I dated briefly in college,” but then I realized dated
briefly was redundant – anyone I went out with in
college was only for a brief time. So
There
was a guy I dated in college – he and I actually had a lot in
common. We were both goofy, all the time telling jokes, one-upping
each other's comments for laughs – but this happened only when we
had an audience – people in class or lab or a rathskeller.
When it was just the two of us, we actually found each other kind of
boring. And that is sad.
But
I do remember most of the funny stuff.
Every
time I am in the shower nowadays, I am reminded of a story of his –
how is that for a legacy? Back in the early seventies, most
houses still only had one bathroom. So this meant that the same tub
was used for every shower or bath each person in the family took. Not at all unusual.
I
don't know what brought the subject up, but one day this young man
said that there were bars of soap piling up in the soap dish part of
the shower at his house. Members of his family were opening up new
soap rather than using what was already in the shower.
Why
were they doing that?
Well,
if the bar of soap already in the shower had a hair on it –
the new person entering the shower assumed it was a pubic hair
– and probably not that person's pubic hair and that person
did not want to use soap which had someone else's pubic hair
on it. So that family member would bring a fresh bar of soap
into the shower, and it would get used by subsequent shower-takers in
the family until such time a hair stayed on that bar of soap
which prompted a new new bar to be introduced to the shower.
And
that is how several bars of soap could end up in the shower at one
time – each having on it one hair of presumed pubic origin from
someone other than the current shower-taker.
If
someone were to remove the hairs in an effort to get the soap
used up, the soap still sat there because everyone would know
the reason it was there was because a hair had been stuck on it
sometime in the near past.
Who
wants to use soap that once touched another person's pubes?
My
friend thought this was amusing. He might have even experimented with
this phenomenon – perhaps he was the one who rinsed the hairs off to see if the
soap would get used after that. He may have stuck the hairs on
the soap just to find out how quickly a new bar was unwrapped – was
it the very next person to take a shower? Was it the same family
member every time getting the new bar of soap?
Come
to think of it when putting this memory to page, this is more of a
theory than actual fact – we don't know if it was hair or
something else that caused the soap to accumulate in the shower –
but it sure is a good story!
When
I step into the shower these days, I am reminded of this anecdote of the
soap and the alleged pubic hairs. And I marvel at how different
everything is now. Today most homes have two or three bathrooms with
shower facilities. Everyone in the family no longer uses the same
shower, and thus, that takes all the mystery away from who
left what where and why.
Perhaps,
just for the sake of scientific curiosity, I should put a hair on the
soap in the guest bathroom, and leave a generous supply of new
wrapped bars of soap within comfortable reach, and see what happens?
253
20150910 There's a Hair in my Soap!
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