Meditation in a cold shower

Random thoughts when filters are down

Every time I have a shower, I swear that my wife is stalking me. Just as I close my eyes and let the hot water relax my back, the water suddenly turns icy cold because she has started the washing machine or dishwasher. Other than her reading these two sentences, I have never confronted her about these sneak attacks on my state of mind. I believe that there is such a thing as “showertime PTSD”. I never get into a shower without a stab of fear of the shot of cold water. It is a muted reaction, to be sure, but it is a reaction.

(Chat GPT wouldn’t draw this with an old man. Hmmm... Facial expressions are pretty much the same though. Weird placement of the lines to the shower and definitely not a water-saving shower head. How I wish…)

The reason I have never confronted my wife about these attacks is because I am pretty sure that I do it as well when I fill up the tea kettle during her showers. If you have followed the history of war, it is often the case that one side will not complain about the divergences from the Geneva Convention by the other side because they are kind of doing the same thing and a stasis in grievance production is preferred over transparency of tactics.

I was contemplating all this following the usual and predictable attack on my peace of mind this morning. This is what I have come up with.

People living in houses built after 1990 don’t know what I am talking about because, by then, home builders had figured out that if the house is plumbed so that the water lines are in parallel, sudden changes in water temperature will not occur when the washing machine is turned on. This begs the question of why it took so long for them to figure this out. For one hundred years, electricians knew about the benefits of wiring in parallel and were doing so. Are plumbers just more stupid than electricians?

The answer to this is that, in general, no, they are not more stupid. Although I can think of some exceptions in my family. The answer, I think, is on the demand side of the issue. I currently live in a house that was built in the 1970s. It is larger with more bathrooms than the house I was raised in which was built in the 1940s. Such houses are heretofore known as wartime houses. The house I was raised in had one bathroom. That is the first critical point. Its construction predated the invention of indoor washing machines. That is the second critical point.

My parents raised four children in a 900 square foot home in which bedrooms were shared. Also, the bathroom was shared. The water flowed from the inlet pipe straight to the shower nozzle via the hot water tank. Unimpeded. When washing machines were introduced, they were located in the basement with the spiders and plumbed in parallel because that is the only way they could be plumbed.

And, by the way, the new washing machines were a big deal. Every Boomer male can remember getting his fingers caught in the roller thingy that was used to squeeze the water out of the clothes. It was as universal as getting your tongue stuck to a steel pole in the winter. So eliminating the rollers was a fine idea. Just ask Hans Rosling.

No one thought about the option of a series connection in wartime houses because that option was effectively eliminated. With the shower beside the toilet, whoever occupied the one also had control of the other. Flushing the toilet to pry me out of the shower was not an option as my brother and sisters would have to break down the bathroom door to turn my idyll into a nightmare – the way my wife does by turning on the washing machine.

“But what about the kitchen faucets?” you ask.

Kitchen sinks were generally so distant from the bathroom that it made more sense to put in a new line from the basement rather than extend the line from the shower. It was a de facto parallel installation. So in the wartime houses plumbing systems were built in parallel but no one thought about that fact. There was just no other way to do it.

In the 1970s things changed. Multiple stories and multiple bathrooms. Where are the bathrooms located? Generally, as close as possible to other bathrooms and other water producing regions of the house. Why? So that copper piping could be saved by plumbing things in series. Remember that the parallel plumbing of the 1940s was done unconsciously. The errors of the 1970s were corrected in the 1990s. After twenty years of unhappy homeowners screaming at them, house builders and plumbers came to the startling conclusion that installing the pipes in parallel might be a more humane way of treating their customers and now the only people challenging the integrity of their marriages are those living in houses built in the 1970s and 1980s. Progress.

Isn’t this interesting? It is why anthropology is such a necessary science. I have applied to the Canadian government for the funds to do a survey of homeowners living in different vintages of housing so that I can test out my theory. With luck I will get funded before a more sensible government takes the reins in Ottawa.

But in writing about this provocative, fascinating and unique glimpse into the intersection of technology with human flourishing, I am reminded of growing up with three siblings in a one toilet home. There is a reason that before the 1970s there was a more laissez faire reaction to peeing into the lilacs. If you were fourth in line, then the option was wet pants. At no period in history have wet pants been acceptable to fourteen-year-old males (or females I suppose).

Here is another anthropological fact about which you are no doubt unaware. Have you ever noticed that the hinges and interior doors of houses built after 1970 are much smaller and thinner than the hinges and doors used in the 1940s? Hollow core doors were unknown prior to the 1970s. Did you ever wonder why? Those who grew up in the wartime houses and wanted to enjoy a bath longer than 15 minutes know that the doors and their hinges were subject to such an iterative pounding from other occupants that they had to be of “castle keep” design.

Here is a random thought. My kids take great pleasure in pointing out that the Boomer generation is the one who has pretty much screwed up the world. I like to point out to them that this is because the Boomer generation grew up with a large number of kids, roughly the same age, fighting for the mashed potatoes. And every Boomer male I know can recount in detail how their big brother would barge into the bathroom as they sat in quiet contemplation ordering them off the throne or else open their legs because “I really have to go”. I know what you are thinking,

“If the doors and hinges were so stout, how did he barge into the bathroom?”

Good question. Have you ever been in a wartime house and wondered why the lock is bent and there is a little hook about eye height to keep the door closed? That hook was not original to the design of the door. Someone’s dad installed that little hook when big brother broke down the door because he really had to go bad. I and my friends still suffer the effects of pushing back into the toilet tank in horror as our brothers’ wandering stream found its way into the bowl. So cut some slack to us Boomers.

Another random thought. My father’s generation is called the “Great Generation” because Tom Brokaw or some other historic illiterate thought fighting in World War II was a big deal. It was a big deal, but do you know what else was a big deal? Fighting in World War I, forming a family and then losing everything in the Depression and being happy when World War II brought back enough prosperity that you and your sons looked forward to going to war. I am much more impressed by my grandfather’s generation.

I wonder what anthropologists in the year 2525 will say about North American life in 2025 when they examine and contrast building styles. My guess is that they will look at numbers of bathrooms, pipe routing and hinge design and think,

“What cataclysmic event occurred in 1971 to cause such a radical departure in home design?”

Because time shrinks as one gets further removed from the events – and 500 years is quite far removed – future anthropologists will conflate covid with home design and posit a connection between the two. There are even Youtube videos like this one,

which point out unbelievable economic correlations with the year 1971. Sadly, the video producers missed the home design changes. I suppose this is because they are not as smart as me but future revisions to the videos are planned.

I am not really sure why I bring all of this up, but I am also not sure how Joe Biden became president of the United States and, given the proximity of our respective ages, I suspect there is a connection. Perhaps I am looking for a gentle way to ask my wife to stop adding to my showertime PTSD. Maybe I wanted to tell the truth of the trauma of being a Boomer. Undoubtedly, I am telling my brother that peeing between my legs was not funny then and the horror has not softened with the passage of time. It defined who I am and that disturbs me.

Mostly, I think, I had an interesting thought in the shower this morning and made the mistake of allowing my filters to stay off. If CS Lewis can write about beams of light in a tool shed then why can’t I write about the shock of a suddenly cold shower.

Funny where idle thoughts can take you.