I love to read. But even better, I love to read in the bathtub. There is something…call it amniotic…about soaking in warm water absorbing words. Now I just can’t imagine I am alone in this pursuit. I can’t help but feel that there are other literature lovers who, like me, love to turn the faucet on as hot as human physiology will permit— just short of shutting down from shock or coma—and then soak like human stew until the water cools to gazpacho.
But I am queen of tub reading. I have been since before my Judy Blume years, even before Beverly Cleary and Beezus and Ramona. Why, I have a wavy copy of Stuart Little that proudly shares a box in the garage with a sister paperback of Wuthering Heights that both look like they came through the CSU Library Spring Creek flood catastrophe.
I have read in the tub with Phineas when he jumped with Gene from the tree and I have wept over Little Ann and Big Dan with tears that were warmer than my bath water. It is a private affair—dim lighted and reclusive, and I have found I can get sometimes nearly three hours out of a good full tub of steaming hot water—enough to induce a complete mindless euphoria I like to call fictionoblivia.But because of this word-n-water habit, good or bad, I have developed another habit—a bad one. GRADING in the bathtub. And it is this bad habit, I’m pretty sure, that led my husband to finally install a hot tub in our back yard. NO students in the world wants to know their teacher read their their essay on Raisin in the Sun while Lazin’ in the Tub. (I could go on with Grapes of Bath and more, but I’ll spare you).
So now the hot tub solves some issues. First of all…it solves that dilemma of reading essays in my bathroom, and the even better…the water NEVER goes cold.
But there is, as I have indicated earlier, one horrible side effect of grading term papers in the hot tub…a little something I like to call it the “distressed essay” look. This is the term paper that takes on the fluted paper muffin-cup-liner look—like the wavy edges of a 1950’s prom dress. I mean, no matter how hard you work to hold them up out of the water, one or two always seem to suffer the side effects of excess humidity. And short of ironing every paper before I return it, I have handed back one or two…or three…or six…papers with inky comments that bleed a little on the page or crinkle a little louder than the others when they’re handed back.
But last week beats all—BEATS ALL.
Last Saturday as I set up my stool and briefcase (filled with 120 American Lit. and AP Comp. research essays) beside the hot tub at 6:30 a.m., I did not foresee the future quite as clearly as I now wish I would have. I flipped back the cover, breathed in the steam, set down my portable mug o’ coffee and slipped carefully into the soup. It never occurred to me that my man had generously—per my directions—refilled the tub while he was hosing off the back porch the previous weekend, and that the level of the water had risen considerably.
I know what you’re thinking. But it’s not true. I DIDN’T overflow the tub. No, I leaned back and sipped my java, listening for the meadowlarks to wake up, watching the sparrows dip and chirp above the pond, following the clouds as they meandered across the sky.
And then a voice in swim trunks came through the steam…”Mind if I join you?”
Yes, my best friend and husband had risen to soak in the hot tub with me, in quiet reverence of the morning and my silent quest to grade. And without another word, he sent a wave of water--just shy of the Tsunami that wiped out the coast of Japan the previous week—over the side of the hot tub right into my briefcase.
One-hundred and twenty papers…and average of seven pages …approximately 400 words per double-spaced page…I think it works out—if my math is close, which is always a variable in the equation—to approximately 335,000 words…UNDER……..WATER.
I spent the morning arranging them, and re-arranging them before the fireplace, praying for them to stop curling like milk in lemon juice and that the words would remain legible enough to read. And just as I reached the point of ultimate despair………..and for those of you who teach, you know what I mean………….the point where you realize you will have to admit to your students just how really stupid you really are……………..I heard the voice of Norman Mclean.
You know it. It’s from a River Runs Through it. And for those of you who haven’t read it, perhaps you’ve seen it, as narrated by Robert Redford (who has the voice of an archangel, I’m pretty sure). It’s the voice of my father, the fisherman, and his father and grandfather who fished before him. It’s the voice that pulls me home to my White River every summer, and the voice that makes me take my shoes and socks off by a stream. It’s the voice hovering over the face of the waters from the beginning of time. It’s the voice from the womb that draws me to water and words.
No wonder I grade papers in the hot tub. No wonder I read in the bath. It’s what I was created to do. Words and water simply go together. They just WERE…from the beginning. Mclean said it like poetry. It’s water and the words.
(Link) View more Robert Redford Sound Clips
"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."
P.S. Myriah, I’m so deeply sorry about your essay. I apologize from the bottom of my toppled pedestal. I’m just SO not perfect.
