Shower Thoughts

While in the shower, I think some of my weirdest and some of my best thoughts. After a month of living out of a suitcase I offer up a praise song to American plumbing--something about a shower makes you believe that all things are possible.

I do background thinking in the shower--the kind of thoughts you rattle around in the back of your head which may or may not see the light of the day after the steam clears and you look at yourself in the mirror. I have been thinking about what it means to be an American. I have been thinking about that because I want to write about it in my column in the Courier next week. On the way to the 1000 or so words in the paper, many more ideas and many many words evaporate with the steam.

As I showered I thought about my father and his comment about shave-shower-and shake your head to get on with whatever needs doing no matter how tired you might have been. That pragmatism and drive is characteristic of many Americans, but not all. And it is hardly unique to Americans.

I took that drive a step further and imagined that a shower can make you believe in manifest destiny. If you are a bit rusty on your American history, that was the benighted idea that Americans were meant to have not only all of the current US but also Canada and probably Mexico and so on. If you speak about manifest destiny these days you need to make sure that you do so with a wide-open Huck Finn smile that says I know this is a misguided idea from our unfortunate past because there is still in American culture some folks who believe in that concept. They frighten me, so I shook my wet hair and sent those thoughts into the vapour.

And then my erstwhile big thoughts were compressed by my own limitations. After a month living out of a suitcase with occasional forays with inevitably the wrong things in an overnight bag, I need to keep myself sufficiently energized to do the last of the chores that have to be done here, soak up all the companionship of my daughter and grandson that I can to store away for when I cannot be part of their everyday lives, and get the things that I have picked up or dropped off back into my suitcase and home. The last elixir to come out of my traveling bag is a small tube--one of those free with purchase samples--that I discovered clearing up the house. The name of this fragrant lotion is Happy. The sympathetic magic associated with anointing myself with Happy no doubt could complete the transformation the shower had begun. I am manifestly ready to take over my own modest corner of the world.