I wash my hands of it

8/4/09 "MEN Moisturizing Body Wash," consumed (bottle recycled)

Through fifteen years of work in education, I've probably received about a dozen gifts from students and their parents. I hope that low total doesn't suggest a lack of appreciation for my work. I prefer to believe that parents were so thankful for my efforts, they felt no gift could adequately convey their gratitude. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Of the dozen gifts I have received, some of the highlights included a camouflage nylon wallet (with velcro seal!), a porcelain figurine of what I think was some sort of Hindu god, and a knock-off Tommy Hilfiger shirt that Bill Cosby would have rocked. Actually, I wore that shirt for several years, but I was just out of college and I hadn't yet developed my now highly-refined sense of fashion.

For Christmas 2004, a kindergarten student presented me with a box of men's toiletries. Hand cream, cologne (Joanna got a good laugh out of the idea of me wearing cologne), a bar of soap, the above pictured body wash, and a few other things I can't recall. Was this a strange gift to give your son's kindergarten teacher? I leave that judgment to you.

For over four years, that bottle of body wash has hunkered down in the back of my bathroom drawer. I'm a bar-of-soap kind of guy, not a body wash user. However, I realized about two weeks ago that the bottle was not going away on its own. Joanna objected to me using it on the basis that this highly artificial product would either A) cause my skin to peel off in wide sheets, or B) lead to a chemical fire in our septic tank. The back of the bottle revealed 27 ingredients, many of which contained numbers and one of which was -- I'm not kidding here -- 26 letters long.

I bravely forged ahead.

This morning, I shook the last few drops from the bottle, wrung out the bath scrubbie (oh, the shame of using a bath scrubbie), and checked by body for lesions. So far, so good.

Tomorrow, I break out a new bar of soap.