Keep this under your bath cap, but I haven’t had a bath in years. I’m a shower person, which is clearly the only way to really get clean.

I’ve never understood people who just sit in tubs staring at the tiles, especially in bubble baths, which are basically perfumed toxic cesspools.

Of course, I remember loving tub baths when I was a kid. It was an after-nap ritual.

Our house at the time was originally part of the historic convent across the street, and everything in it was old. The tub in our one bathroom was one of those old fashioned jobs with claw feet that came with the house.

It was a large white tub situated under a big window that flooded the room with light and looked out at the convent.

I don’t remember when rubber duckies were invented, but I didn’t have one. I was given all manner of little boats, warships and sailboats to wage war with.

You give a kid like me (who had already a gift for making up stories) bath toys like that, and you’ve created a writer.

I can’t tell you how many girls I’ve mesmerized with stories with all the drama created at 9 years old in the bathtub.

There was Rachel at the bar in the Plaza’s Oak Room.

“That’s kinky” she said, as she crinkled her nose. “Did you know that you were bathing in a tub that nuns bathed in?”

I sent Rachel home in a cab. You don’t want to be putting thoughts like that in a Catholic boys head, you know I mean?

The most impressive tub I ever saw was in the old “Gangsters” house my mother moved us to down on South Broadway during the war.

It was in a spacious bathroom with windows overlooking the Mississippi River and sat on huge lions feet and featured a bronze lion’s face that spit the water.

And then, years later I met She, who would eventually become my wife. When She finally invited me to join her in her tiny upper East Side apartment (providing I followed the rules in a manual published by the Vatican), She nixed the tub, but allowed me only the shower, featuring a tiny chrome hose that resembled a gun barrel that jutted out of the tiles, and only had one level, Brute Force One.

The inspiration for all of this foreshadowing was the recent installation of a new state of the art shower head in our mutual place of bathing.

It initially came with a side arm that hung down to the drain. Unable to deal with the sidearm, She asked to have it removed.

There’s more. Because of her really bad left knee, I installed a bath chair. As a result of my bad arthritic left large toe, I fell in love with the best bath invention since the shower curtain.

I now shower twice a day, once in the morning, once again before dinner, and I may add another if I can invent an excuse.

I ask you, my male readers: Have you tried shaving while sitting while the warm water cascades over you and soothes the day’s pandemic stresses?

I can tell you it’s the most attractive and sensuous experience I’ve had since using the nun’s old tub.

Don’t tell Rachel.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer. 

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