Sharon Nesbit has just returned from paradise, so this is a reprint of a past column.
For Christmas, I got two gift certificates for massages from people who obviously thought I needed to be rubbed some way other than the wrong way.
It is some indication of my stress level in December, as I was finishing the Troutdale history book (stay tuned, it’s coming soon), that friends — perhaps victims — believed my anxiety should be eased. (They call it a deadline because it darn near kills you.)
“Maybe it will get her off our backs,” my friends likely said, “if we stretch her out naked on a hard bed and have the daylights pounded out of her.” I am pretty sure the same situation constitutes abuse in Guantanamo, but never mind.
But here’s the rub, as they say. With my deadline looming, I didn’t have time for a massage. Had I an hour to squander, I would have curled up in a chair and sucked a hot-buttered rum.
Sister Sue, reasoning that I would have more squandering time in Maui, gave me a gift certificate good at any of four spas on the island. I considered letting it slide.
In Maui, I need relaxation like a moose needs a hat rack. But being too cheap to waste a hundred bucks, I went off investigating available massage parlors. I concluded that I didn’t want to be massaged in someone’s spare bedroom, the back room of a beauty parlor or the sheet-draped closet of a pre-fab office space.
That put me at a fancy new spa in the uppity part of the island where the attendants all wear chocolate brown uniforms and speak in whispers. The place was tastefully littered with fragrant candles and fresh orchids, a fantastic array of plumbing fixtures with fanciful sinks and gleaming hardware, and enough snowy, white towels to dry a U.S. Marine division.
It seems to me that getting a massage is a lot like going to the doctor. You have to make an appointment. You have to get up and shower and shave your legs and drive an hour or so. You have to take off all your clothes, put on a robe, lay on a sheet-draped table and be touched by strangers. And it costs you just about the same amount of money.
One difference though, a massage feels a whole lot better. Perhaps more docs should throw in a massage as part of the package. Think what it would do to lower blood pressure statistics.
You’d have the massage first, of course. Then the doc would come in and ask how you were and you’d murmur, “Oh, I’m fine, really.” And he would move on to people who were really sick.
Being in Hawaii and being chubby, I asked for the lomi lomi massage, preferred by Hawaiian queens who were pretty big babes. I assume the Hawaiians used coconut oil, but I don’t know what kind of oil Sarah used.
When she was done, she asked how I felt, and I said, “Slick.”
But I felt longer and taller, somehow. And, after a shower with potions of cinnamon, mango and vanilla that made me smell like a cake, I was still too languid to drive. So I lingered over lunch until I had worked up enough anxiety to drive home in Maui’s nose-to-tail traffic.
By the time I hit Lahaina yelling at the idiots who stop in the middle of the road to watch whales, I was just fine. Really.
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Sharon Nesbit is a former reporter and columnist for The Outlook.
