Rubber Ducky, You’re So the One

It is 6:30 a.m. She is sitting in the opulent guest bathroom of her sister- and brother-in-law’s Chicago home, snuggled up in a throw, on the floor, writing. Her husband and dog are still asleep in the adjacent guest room, and she doesn’t want to wake them. The three of them will be traveling later this morning to Wisconsin for a short autumn beach vacation.

Her in-laws are boat owners who sail as often as they can, and their guest bath is decorated in rich sea imagery: sailboat votives and towels, the colors blue and green, seashell shapes, and a framed nautical chart of Cape Hatteras. An adventurer’s source of direction is found printed on the clear vinyl shower curtain. It is a map of the world.

She gazes at the map and, true to form so early in the morning when she writes and is sensitive to all things considered, it becomes a meditative focus. As though she’s looking at a large Pollock--her favorite painter--and responding viscerally to the drips and swirls, she looks long at the map and begins to think of herself in relation to it. All its borders, its colors, its place names.

After just a moment, though--unlike when she would be studying a Pollock and feeling connected, kinesthetic, and inspired--she starts to feel uneasy. She closes her eyes.

She begins recounting her life, and in her recounting, she has landed in fourth grade, when she first pieced together the big world and the notion of traveling.

It was in fourth grade that she made a colored salt map of the earth’s seven continents, in seven different colors, and wrote a history of each one. She then wrote a long report on the solar system and declared it’d be fun to visit the moon. (The summer prior, Apollo 11 had landed.) She received an A++ on both assignments. Her teacher said it appeared she was going to be a world traveler someday, and she told her teacher she was right. To prove it, she made a list of places she would visit when she grew up. The list was lengthy. She had big plans.

She realizes this morning that of the places she declared as a girl she would someday visit, she has visited exactly none.

It is not long before the light of day begins to fill the bathroom.

*
Memories have a way of taking hold, and sometimes they are awful in their holding: heavily draped, needy, lingering. She has many memories like these. She knows that if she lets memory and regret take to her now, these feelings will drive her onto that old familiar path of overwhelm. She will get swept down some crazy river into the rough rapids of her heart’s deepest disappointments, which will feel as they are rocking her on some too-small raft, tossing around with her while some deep-ocean, humpback whale tune mourns in her ear: This sky, too, is folding under you/And it's all over now, Baby Blue. She starts to feel quite uneasy and sad and wishes she could take cover. This is not the quiet time she was hoping for, here on her first day of vacation.

So. My life is not what I intended it to be when I was ten, she writes. Does that matter? Does it? She writes more, of past mistakes, of paths taken and abandoned, of lost opportunities, of sorrow.

Her husband and dog start stirring in the next room. Now it is time to get ready for her day, which she is desperately hoping will improve.

Moments later, when she pushes open the shower curtain map of the world and leans to draw a bath, she spies one more decorative bathroom item. This piece is not nautical. It is whimsical, childlike.

It’s a yellow rubber ducky. He’s springy, perky, and perched atop a folksy, twisted beaded wire hung over the tub’s faucet. Dangling jauntily from the wire like a crooked sign nailed to an old road post is a clear plastic packet of bright green bath gel, and the packet reads, in snow white letters, “I know there are some things in the world a bubble bath won’t cure, but I don’t know what.”

And in another moment, she steps into the bath, takes a few deep breaths and closes her eyes again, warmed by message, warmed by water.

Right here, right now, let go of the ‘must see’ list, she tells herself. Right here, right now, at the start of a vacation that isn’t Morocco, is miles from Machu Picchu, and is not as mighty as young-girl dreams of Marseilles, here today on the way to Manitowoc, be grateful. This is your journey. This is your journey for now. The miraculous Midwest of the United States, Cleveland to Chicago to Manitowoc, this is journey enough.

And this is the journey extraordinaire: a simple bath, a simple act to soothe one back into one’s presence, to return one unharmed to the moment, the incredible, intimate journey of life, of craggy existence and its sometimes solid, sometimes slippery stepping stones, of home, of hope with all its feathers, of generous family and friends, and of the traveling, sprightly-footed spree of the indomitable heart that knows all this, and which is the eye and the spyglass rapturous, waiting, on watch in the crow’s nest at the top of the world.

She sinks. She surfaces.