Bathtub Families

Last night I met--live and in person--an imaginary friend, ReadersGuide, who was in town to visit the local college with her younger daughter. And aside from the initial nervousness about meeting someone I knew only virtually (all of our kids said "mom, you're not supposed to meet people you know from the internet!"), it was delightful. Because we did already know each other. And unlike real-life friends, where there's usually some element of catching up, we could take the conversation up where we'd left off, only in a little more depth and with me racing around saying "see? here's this thing I talk about, right here!"

Meeting someone I knew previously only through the written word made me think of this poem by Billy Collins:

Bathtub Families

is not just a phrase I made up
though it would have given me pleasure
to have written those words in a notebook
then looked up at the sky wondering what they meant.

No, I saw Bathtub Families in a pharmacy
on the label of a clear plastic package
containing one cow and four calves,
a little family of animals meant to float in your tub.

I hesitated to buy it because I knew
I would then want the entire series of Bathtub Families,
which would leave no room in the tub
for the turtles, the pigs, the seals, the giraffes, and me.

It's enough just to have the words,
which alone make me even more grateful
that I was born in America
and English is my mother tongue.

I was lucky, too, that I waited
for the pharmacist to fill my prescription,
otherwise I might not have wandered
down the aisle with the Bathtub Families.

I think what I am really saying is that language
is better than reality, so it doesn't have
to be bath time for you to enjoy
all the Bathtub Families as they float in the air around your head.

Now I can add a mental image of ReadersGuide when I think about her, but meeting her didn't change my picture of her otherwise. Especially for those of us who love language, it can be "better than reality" because you don't have to bother with airline tickets and driving down deer-strewn highways on windy nights and children who get sick when someone is visiting (as Walker did last night). Eating pizza and drinking wine with someone in real life beats the heck out of doing it virtually. But I enjoy all of you imaginary readers who float in the air around my head and into the comments here!