Bath or shower?

Commercials sure like to show gals soaking in the bathtub. I wonder. My mom always considered it akin to stewing in your own filth; she was a shower-taker exclusively and encouraged same among the rest of the family. My wife has no interest in baths -- she just wants to get clean, not make a big production out of it. (She saves the big production afterward, for her hair.) 

Me? I used to like a good bath sometimes. Like, when I'd worked out too hard and everything hurt. Or when I drank too much and had one of those killer hangovers, the kind where you have stopped feeling nauseated but want to sweat the remaining booze out of your pores. A bath could be very therapeutic at times like that. These days I don't drink and barely exercise, so I pretty much stick to the shower.

I do remember a bed & breakfast we stayed in years ago in which the bathroom had no shower. It had a huge clawfoot tub with shower attachment on a hose, so you could wash your hair and I guess spray off any filth you'd been stewing in. I loved it -- as a moderately big guy it was great to be in a tub that fit me so well. (Shower/tub combos always skimp on the latter.) My wife wasn't so keen for reasons cited above, but she did admire the decor. 

The last one to use an actual tub in our house was the dog. Izzy had gone beyond the friendly confines of the backyard, into an area where runoff goes from the pond, and became blackened from the chest down. Of course it was very cold outside, so there was no bathing him out there; I had to de-mud him just enough with old towels to get him inside to the bathtub where I could do the rest of the job. Normally he gets a good scrub-down once a month at the groomer, but here his perfidy resulted in an unscheduled and more thorough bathing. Puppy, thy name is mud!

I guess I would tell the would-be homeowner or apartment hunter that it's always good to have a tub in case of such emergencies. You never know. One time when I was a kid, Mom and I picked up a big feast from a restaurant and drove it home -- or rather, not all of it, because a loose lid led me to a bath of chowder in the passenger seat of the car. Fortunately it was not hot enough to cause serious burns, but getting into the tub back home and letting the cold water do its thing may have saved me from worse injury. 

Well, one way or another, you gotta get clean sometimes, a sometimes a bath is the way to go. Just don't forget the ducky, and the soap.