I've been having some sort of irritation in my eyes. I wash them out with my regular soap, Irish Spring, and everything is fine for a little while. Then, it starts to feel like I have something in my eyes. The best I can explain it is this... It feels like morning "eye boogers" but you can't rub them out. Sometimes (Gross Alert!!) I can even wipe white sticky "boogers" from my eyes... The other symptom is that direct sunlight seems to make it worse.
I decided to try a new kind of soap.
So... I went to Wally World and bought a three-pack of Ivory Soap. When I opened the soap up this morning to begin my face wash, Tami happened to be in the room. So I stuck the bar out to her and said "Here. Smell this and tell me what it reminds you of."
She took a whiff of the Ivory Soap bar and then said "At school...."
I interrupted with "EXACTLY!!! It reminds me of School!" More particularly, it reminds me of art classes when I went to the Junction Hill Elementary School.
It seems like every year, we had an art class that included carving "something" out of a bar of Ivory Soap. The teacher would announce that we needed to bring a bar of Ivory Soap to school for an art project.
Our family used Zest...
Zest would not work Dove wouldn't either. Even "Clean As A Whistle" Irish Spring would not work. It had to be Ivory!
So the bar of Ivory Soap would be procured, taken to school and readied for the future Michelangelo's to sculpt. As I am typing this, I am wondering... Did they let us use knives to carve with?? Third and fourth boys with sharp knives? I'm lucky to still have my fingers! My old school friends are lucky to still have their fingers. And other appendages...
Every one of us started out with confidence and a determination to carve the best "whatever" that anyone had ever seen. A Turtle? A Dog? A Fish? The best I can recollect, the teacher had only a few patterns and we had to choose one of them. Otherwise, some smart alack like me would have tried to carve the Statue of Liberty or The Eiffel Tower.
As it turned out, I would start carving... Let's just say a turtle. After working on it for a few class periods, I would despair of caving anything remotely resembling a turtle and try to convert it into a fish... or a snail... or an egg... My high hopes would descend into low expectations.
What I usually ended up with was something that faintly resembled Quasimodo... with no teeth, missing an arm, both legs and an ear, complete with the wart over his left eye...
How did the teacher keep a straight face when she complimented us on our masterpieces? And not break out in hysterical laughter??
I do know this; when I stuck that bar of Ivory Soap up to my nose, and breathed in... I was transported back to a simpler, uncluttered little world of good memories....
You can read more about Ivory Soap Here
It's funny how a smell can transport us through time. My paternal grandfather was a barber, and like many men of his time, chewed tobacco. There was a spittoon near his rocking chair in the barbershop. There was a long shelf in front of a huge mirror that covered the back wall of the shop which held bottles of colorful lotions and toilet waters, jars of pomade, and his customer's personalized shaving mugs . On the far end there was a drawer where grandpa kept wrapped pieces of Fleer's bubble gum. It is also the place where he stored his plugs of chewing tobacco. To this day, when I smell a piece of bubble gum, I also smell that tobacco and am transported back in time.
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