JumpStop

This morning, I was leafing through a decorating magazine as we had breakfast. The magazine was glossy and well-photographed, with every room filled with casually-tossed (yet just so) throw pillows, the inevitable bowl of fruit on the gleaming marble countertops. The homes were, by and large, amazing, with vibrant, rich transformations from their prior lives as, apparently, goat-stalls into rooms worthy of Louis XVI (if he takes his shoes off prior to coming in). Not that I scorn this stuff -- I just could never see myself paying for it. But there are things in there that I just wonder about.

One is a shower head that promises to deliver a strong, intense spray with which to 'jumpstart your day'. I know that the image of the shower users varies between the muscular, athletic guy who wants nothing more than a blast of water, cold, preferably, and plenty of it -- showering under Niagara Falls would be just the ticket for that guy -- and the soft, dreamy cloudscape that the woman wants, with candles flickering in the corners of the room, and a gentle mist throughout. Our shower is -- well, its a shower. It does the job. Its not as strong as I'd like, but its not bad. It certainly does not jumpstart the day, and thats a good thing. As my wife put it, when she was younger, she didn't need a shower to jumpstart the day, and now that she's older, she doesn't want one. I'm much the same way. I need to ease into the day. Don't ask me to think, and especially don't ask me to do anything complicated. It takes me a while to wake up, and being shocked into shivering awakeness by a blast of water doesn't sound to me like the ticket for a fine start to the day.

Occasionally, I find myself wondering how the wealthy ease into their days. I imagine it something like the sequence in the film Trading Places, where the manservant brings them up a cup of coffee and a crisp croissant on a tray and gently awakens them. There are devices that will simulate that -- for example, the Voco Clock , which offers pleasant recorded messages to slowly wake you up. I have to admit that the couple of times I've actually had breakfast in bed, it didn't strike me as all that wonderful, as I had to be very careful not to slosh or spill anything by a sudden incautious move. The idea, though, is pretty delightful.

And about as far away from being jumpstarted as you can imagine.