The importance of being clean

       Mostly it  is thinking we are clean, like healthy enough to keep from getting sick from our own selves.

            Often it is truly being clean, both healthy and smelling OK to both ourselves and our mates, either real or pursued. Even our clothing probably counts some, too.

            Now in our spoiled new world USA way of thinking, all bathing is in warm water.  Well, we can get clean in cold water, too. I've done it. Like often.

            And part of being clean can include things like baby-wipes to wash our privates, armpits, etc.

            Even consider how to wipe your urine and poop waste from your body during hard times. I myself have done it, too.

            I have never forgotten an interview Art Linkletter did with a young kid around a half century ago. It was about bathing in rural USA. In the story, there was a priority system for bathing in a big galvanized tub in his home. When Art Linkletter asked him how he enjoyed the clean water, he responded he had never had clean water since all his older siblings had gone before him. The whole audience laughed, since it was both cute, funny, and also realistic for the time.

            So if times get hard, this kind of standard may return. So be it. I still think I will and can be clean.

            Even in my USMC time in Korea, sharing a communal warm water bath in the local ville, filthy even by USMC standards, was still a good way to go; before eating local food and drinking local beer, watching Rambo movies, taking the truck back to the cantonment, and hitting  the rack. Even then we had "coffee can" chamber pots to pee in during the night.

            Said another more rural USA way, our once a week or once a month bath has more credibility to me, like I believe most of us lived that way not too long ago. And we can do it again, if we have to.

            I can even imagine being more "smelly" in the cold season;  and using swimming in the warm season as a way of bathing,  like to make ourselves and our mates happier.

            Who knows these days?