I remember when my bar of soap in the shower was fresh and large and satisfying. I like the way a new bar of soap feels in my hand, all heavy and bursting with potential. It makes you want to shout to the world, “I HAVE PLENTY OF SOAP!” When soap is abundant, I’ll wash parts of my body that aren’t even dirty, just because I can.
Ah, those were the days.
About a week ago, that bar of soap had shrunken to the size of a small dog’s ear. It was still functional, but no longer the joy it had been. I can afford to replace soap before it surrenders its last bubble, but that would be wasteful. So I snugged the dog ear into the palm of my hand and lathered up. The tiny soap got me clean, but I couldn’t enjoy it.
Ah, those were the days.
More recently, I was in the shower, all wetted down, and reached for what I figured would be, by then, a Chiclet-sized bar of soap, only to find no soap at all. I wiped the fog off the glass shower wall and squinted to the bathtub area. There it was. My wife had moved it. Damn her love of baths! Now I had a tough decision.
1. Abort shower, dry off, fetch Chiclet, fetch dry towel, restart the process.
2. Walk wet across the bathroom wet, fetch Chiclet. Slip on the wet floor and die.
3. Use shampoo on my entire body and tell myself it’s “the same as soap”
I shampooed my body. It’s the same as soap, right?
Ah, those were the days.
I soon learned that my wife had moved the Chiclet because we had no other bars of soap in the house. I probably should have made myself a note right then and there to add it to the shopping list. Soon, the soap was the size of a Tic Tac. Then a grain of rice. Then. . . I dropped it.
I don’t know if you have ever tried to pick up a tiny piece of soap after it hits the shower floor. It’s difficult, even if you aren’t in prison. It suctions itself to the tile floor and starts to melt almost immediately. I tried to pry up some of its little soap body, but I was too late. My soap had failed me, or perhaps I had failed it. In the end, I was wet, and dirty, and still a soap waster.
If you have not tried to wash your entire body with the soap you have under one fingernail, it’s harder than you think. Once again, I reached for the shampoo. That was empty too. I considered the other sources of soap in the house. There was the dishwasher soap, but that seemed like it might hurt for some reason that wasn’t entirely clear to me.
We had liquid hand soap at all the sinks, but I couldn’t see myself toweling off and bringing a nice soap dispenser in the shower. And given my soap-dropping propensities, the dispenser would either break my foot or burst into sharp pieces and unleash a Walt Disneyesque tsunami of bubbles that would fill the shower and eventually the entire house.
I ended up taking a water-only shower, but only because I didn’t think of the toothpaste until I wrote this.