Washing My Face

I walk into the bathroom to wash my hands, which I do, using our favorite Dr. Bronner's soap, and while the hands are rinsed but still wet, redolent with peppermint, I bring them to my face and clean—rubbing the cheeks, pressing the eyes to get that delightful weird relief that a hard eyerubbing can give, a swoop over the bald pate, then a brisk toweling off.

And I can swear, every time I do that, that I can feel a rind fall off, a caul dissolve, and for a moment my skin and the self that it covers feels an alive a step above the day-to-day alive, that dull sentience. "Jazz" feels like a good word to use, "zizz" is another, the skin primed, for what I don't know, and relieved of a burden. I can understand the spiritual charge in the phrase "washed clean."

Not just washed but washed clean. What does that mean? Clean of what? We all know what, at least the Judeo/Christians do—the dirt/dirtiness of life, of the body and its pounding needs and grubby urges that cause all manner of complications and uncertainties and anxieties. Aiming for the clean of the spotless mind, the untroubled gut, the certainty of destiny.

But cleanliness like this is an absence. It is the dirt that strengthens our immune system, that gives our senses the textures they need to help us navigate the world. "Washed clean" is only good if it provides a reset, not an erasure—that's what my face-washing does: resets the prow of the body so that it can make another foray through the craziness and stuffiness of life.

(As a public service announcement—of course, hard eyerubbing is something you should not do because it can possibly cause damage to the cornea, bring in infections, cause darker circles under the eyes—but every once in a while, like most should-not pleasures, will not kill the cat. And we all die anyway.)

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Scratching

Last night, as we were falling asleep, the Marvelous María Beatriz asked me to scratch her back.

Now, to do this properly, the scratchee needs to give the scratcher good topographical directions to get to the itch location without being able to see the terrain, which is quite a remarkable thing for the brain to do: map the back it's never seen (except in reverse in a mirror) and then orally deliver the directions to the other person in increasingly finer detail.

"Down—down—now up—just a hair—to the right—down—just a tad—got it!"

Such a simple thing done in such an offhand way, no more thought given to it than brushing off lint, yet an exquisite example of fine engineering evolved over hundreds of thousands of years just so that I can lie in the dark with the Marvelous María Beatriz, cancel her itch and fall off to sleep with her, my hand resting on her hip in the relieved darkness.