At one of our baby showers a gift was bestowed upon us: a gift certificate for a Burke Williams day spa. The fact that I routinely mislabeled it as "Burke Sonoma" or "Williams & Burke" should shed light on the fact that I'm not a typical spa-going person.
I work.
I get up early and leave for work before 7 am. I'm home usually by 4 pm, when I take the Boy and spell Corrie for a few hours. Afterwards we switch again and I make dinner, then we eat, then I do the dishes, shave, and head to bed. And I consider myself and those days as "having the easy job."
Corrie spends all day with the boy, making sure he flourishes. It's her who wakes up at 3 am to soothe and nurse; it's her who spends sleepy mornings watching him smile---and nothing else, and it's her who gets only a few hours a day to keep her business afloat.
It was this confluence of forces that caused me surprise when she said that I should take the gift certificate and have a "spa day"...or maybe just get a massage.
I'm a regular person. I may travel to remote Earthly outposts and have legitimate literary aspirations and know my way around a kitchen more than most American men, but I work for a living. I don't lounge away the days at the spa or out golfing. (I do like to golf, though.)
Corrie set the whole thing up, which was both nice and necessary, as I lag at the best of times. It was to be a fifty minute massage, and, because the massage was north of a cost threshold, I would be able to use the facilities for the day.
After changing into a robe and their (sorta gross) little everyman-sandals, I headed down to the waiting/mustering area, trying to make sure my robe didn't flop open flashing the "kept" women also spending a Friday afternoon at the spa. (Thanks for the long weekend, public institution!)
They had tea on the offer. I would have preferred coffee, but that doesn't yield calm clients. I sat with the tea and read an article about the 50th anniversary of "Revolver" and how it was the Beatles first LSD album. The article talked about how John and George were spiked unknowingly for their first trip, and went on into details about how they got the other boys into the fold, and how it began to alter their music---I was enthralled. Which meant that they had to come for me.
I didn't get to finish the article. I'm sure I could find it...
The massage was nice, but seemed like it was over fast. It was a deep tissue Swedish deal. Maybe I didn't drink enough water afterwards, because my shoulder was killing me for the better part of a week, just returning to its normal tense recently.
From there I decided to take advantage of "the facilities." That meant either the steam room, the sauna, the jet pool/hot tub, and probably some other rooms I decided I didn't need to know about.
The sauna was very nice and very hot, even as it cooled down to the upper 160s as I kept opening the door, coming and going. At this point it was just me and I felt like ruining that robe. I spent a few minutes in the jets of the hot tub, in between stints in the sauna and steam room.
The sauna was super dry. I guess that afternoon was when I learned the difference between the sauna and the sphitz: the sauna is the hot-as-balls room with the wooden benching where you sit and sweat, but it's a dry heat. It was making me sleepy, and that was on the wall as a serious thing to pay attention to. The sphitz is the steam room, so foggy and humid visibility is barley feet, and inches when the steam valve does its emitting. It's very hot as well, but probably only in the 140s to 150s.
I turns out I like the steam room better. It got to the point where I felt like a space traveler on a new planet, one who's atmosphere is so dense and humid and hot that humans can survive without the helmet, but maybe for only a bit of time. Is this what a hot, humid, steam planet might be like?
Pretty soon I showered and rinsed the oils and sweat off my body and headed home.
I'd rather hold my kid any day, at least while I still can.
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