Professor Harlebut believed that hot water was the defining characteristic of human civilization. “It’s what separates us from the savages. From the beasts, no less!” he was often heard to say at cocktail parties.
As he lounged in the bathtub catching up on his reading, he considered the possibility that the entire trajectory of human evolution had been established by the temperature of the pool of slime where the first amino acids congregated. He was absolutely convinced that the puddle in question had been warm. He used the big toe of his right foot to twist the handle labeled H. He settled deeper into the sudsy water.
Suddenly, he scrambled to his feet, sloshing water across the white tile floor. “Good heavens!”
He swiped a faded, tattered towel across his back, blotted his bare scalp just enough so his glasses wouldn’t slip off his ears, and knotted the towel around his waist. He padded down the hall, leaving a trail of wet footprints to the study. He pulled several books off the shelves and dripped bathwater onto the dusty pages. He couldn’t lay his hands on the passage he was trying to recall. He thought maybe he’d read something in Titus Livius, or maybe it was Suetonius. Or was it somewhere in Gibbon?
“Nevertheless,” he thought, “I’m sure my reasoning is sound.”
None of his colleagues could dissuade him from the experiment. In view of his family’s longstanding relationship with the university, the department chair was not inclined to deny him the resources he requested. Accordingly, the Harlebut Primate Research Laboratory was remodeled at the university’s expense to include the finest state-of-the-art bathroom fixtures that anthropological-research money could buy. As soon as the updated facilities were ready for use, Professor Harlebut and his team of graduate students began teaching personal hygiene to the chimpanzees and orangutans.
The first stumbling block was persuading the animals that the bar soap was not a foodstuff. Although Professor H. considered it a step backward in the bathing arts, he grudgingly acceded to the suggestion to replace his preferred Cashmere Bouquet with an institutional pink powder—a soap for which the chimps had no appetite.
Note: The prompt for today was “hot water.” I do some of my best thinking when I’m bathing, don’t you? [The author scratches his head with a simian gesture.]
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
This one is great! Your professors are always a little eccentric and off the deep end, but this one makes me laugh! I definitely want to get to the end of this story – do they learn to bathe, do they like it? Do they eat all the soap? Do they start reading in the tub, too? I like this one alot!
I have a soft spot for kooky professors. (Maybe if my therapist is reading, he’d like to chime in at this point.)
I’ve read several interesting things recently about lawsuits regarding the rights of chimpanzees, including an article that quoted an attorney who suggested that chimps might be only a few thousand years away from developing what we’d call “high culture,” if only humans weren’t standing in the way of their progress.
Here’s another nice story about chimps.
You read this one to me when I came home one day. You were very pleased with it and I must confess, so was I. I can see this story going off in all directions. I’m thinking poking fun at all we find normal (you know, like back when there was that whole flat earth/round earth thing) and taking us down some very fun path. I hope this becomes something big some day.
Thanks! But then a few days ago I started thinking, “Hey! Wait a minute! Didn’t somebody already do this idea in five Planet of the Apes movies and two TV series?”
My version will have fewer guns and whips and people in cages, I think.