Shower Power

no--ours does not look like this one (wish it did)

Last night--at midnight--two of our antique clocks--a cuckoo that had once belonged to my great-grandfather, a mantle clock that we bought at an old-clock shop in Lake Forest, Illinois, in 1978--simultaneously counted the hour. This never happens. The clocks are old, imprecise, and their cuckoos/bongs hardly ever align at all--and certainly not in perfect synchrony. But last night they did.

The clocks do not waken me anymore. They are part of the heartbeat of the house, as unnoticeable as the rhythm of my own interior clock. But I was awake because I'd just visited the Little Room Where Old Men Go at Night. And I was smiling about something that had happened earlier in the evening ...

After supper, we'd driven over to Aurora (about 20 min east), where we went to the McD's drive-thru and got a couple of Diet Cokes. We like the country drive over there on Old Mill Road, the return on Aurora-Hudson Rd., the road that goes right by Harmon Middle School, where I spent so many wonderful years teaching 8th graders.

Anyway, last night, on the way home, about halfway from Harmon to the Western Reserve Racquet Club, I started telling Joyce about an odd experience I'd had lately. (Now we've reached the part about the shower.) I told her that a couple of weeks ago, about to leave the shower, something had felt ... well, wrong about the process.

Regular readers here know that I'm a Creature of Habit--pretty much do the same things at the same time every day. But I am not suffering from OCD. No way! (This morning, btw, a former student, now a teacher herself, saw me in the coffee shop and told me I was late ... my "issue" is well known.)

So back to the shower: When I finish, I take the squeegee that Joyce insists I use and scrape the glass walls of our stall. Then I open the door, reach out, and grab the towel I've draped over the edge of the adjacent bathtub. I dry as much as I can inside the shower stall, then step outside to finish.

Okay. Here's the problem: A couple of weeks ago I noticed that something was wrong about how I was stepping out of the shower. It didn't feel ... correct.

Now, we've had this stall since 1997 when we moved into our current place. And I've been stepping out of it the same way for, well, nearly twenty years. But a couple of weeks ago I could not remember: Do I step out with the left or right foot first? Whichever way I did it just seemed flat wrong.

I tried a different way each day. Nope. Wrong.

Then, a couple of days, ago, I remembered! The problem was that for some reason I'd begun holding onto the door handle when stepping out. I didn't used to do that. (And why I started doing so is one of Life's Mysteries.)

The right way to do it: Push the door gently open, step out with the left foot, reach for the towel (left hand), step back inside, keep the door slightly open so the steam doesn't accumulate again, dry off.

The past few days I've been doing it correctly again, and I feel so much better.

As I was telling this story on Aurora-Hudson Rd. last night to Joyce, who was totally unaware of this particular neurosis of mine, she kept saying Good God! Good God! And seemed to be deciding whether to laugh or scream.

Which, basically, is what a marriage is all about, eh?