On My Love of Bathtubs

There I was...
nice summer morning, windows and doors open, sunlight spreading itself across the wood floor. Suddenly the air was filled and I had to rush to the window to poke my head out. There on the street below I spied a pair of long-white socks with little tassels thru the trees. Then a skirt, then I saw the tops of the bagpipes. THERE WAS A DUDE IN FULL PIPING-GARB PLAYING THE FRIGGIN' BAGPIPES ON MY STREET!!!! (shrug) Nothin'...he was just walking around in front of his house playing. Well, of course I cheered loud enough for him to hear when he finished his first set. Yes, first of many. He played for 2 or 3 hours. How much better could life get? Well, I'll tell ya. This glorious serenade was interrupted by my doorbell (which is somewhat obnoxious). When I got to the bottom of my stairs a precarious package sat before me. It was none other than my worms. My sweet red wigglers. I had to order these babies. I guess you can’t just go and buy worms at the store or nursery, or any freakin’ where for that matter. I eagerly opened the box to find a plastic tub with a bunch of little holes poked in it. The instructions said not to open it just to look at the worms. Like givin’ a kid a lollipop and telling him not to lick it. COME ON PEOPLE! I WANNA SEE MY WORMS! I imagined a tub of slimy red worms writing and wriggling and twisting around each other and damn it! I wanted to see it. Well, I resisted. First things first, I told myself. I got out the bin I made a couple weeks ago and emptied it. I had bought, along with the worms, some strange coconut “bedding” which arrived in the shape of a brick. I was to soak it and it would expand 9 times it size. Well, of course I thought (as I think about nearly everything), “I’ll just throw it in the bathtub”. I love my bathtub. I have almost always had good tubs. And if anything can be cleaned by throwing it in the tub, well, damn if that’s not the way I would do it. I dye fabric in the tub, give large plants a shower when they get dusty, I’ve done laundry and dishes in the tub. I throw Ringo in the tub all the time. I LOVE MY TUB! Today, however, I wished that “throw it in the tub” was not my first instinct, because it was not pretty. That coconut brick didn’t just expand. It expanded and fell apart. Instead of having a very large, wet brick, I had brown soup. I had to use a tea sieve to try to corral the millions of little tiny coconut pieces. Okay, so now the bedding is in the bin, along with a bunch of shredded newspaper and phone book pages. It turns out that our paper here, the Oregonian, uses soy-based ink (how very Portland of them, don’t you think?) Who knows, probably all newspapers do. Finally the moment came when I could unveil the worms. So I did. Nothing. Just a bunch of dirt. Grrrrrr. I dumped the bucket upside down on the bedding and lo’ and behold! there they were. A bunch of skinny red worms. Within minutes they had all disappeared down into the bedding. Tomorrow they will dine on their first veggie-scrap cocktail.

I love worms. And my tub.

And bagpipes.