Soap, in one form or another, has been a part of my family for three generations, and now, perhaps, four.

My great grandfather, Arthur Edelmuth, began a soap factory in Frankfurt, Germany.  The factory made white soap and brown soap.  The white soap was cosmetic soap, while the brown soap was for industrial purposes.  They marketed to the Jewish hospitals throughout Germany and did pretty well for themselves.

I never saw any of the white soap, but my grandmother had a little chunk of the brown soap, which she used to wash dishes.  It lasted over seventy years.  That’s some soap.

The nazis interrupted the prosperity of the Edelmuth soap company, and my family, or what was left of it, fled to America.  My grandfather decided to cater to drycleaners and instead of the incredibly long lasting brown soap, he and his little brother made carbon tetrachloride and other nasty cleaning fluids.

My father Walter went into the family business, somewhat against his will, but it all came to a crashing end when he caught a wildfire fever that burned him away at the age of twenty-nine.

Heartbroken, my grandfather sold the company to Dow Chemical and the family soap story came to an end.

But now, a hundred and thirty-five years later, I’m thinking about soap.  Maybe I’ll make some.  Maybe.

Perhaps, soap is in my blood.  That would explain the bubbles.

It started when my darling wife wanted to watch “Wolf,” a movie from the nineties starring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer.  Although it started with some promise, it was horrible, truly horrible, and I tried to figure out why it got made.  In my research, I found a remark from one of the writers, Jim Harrison, of how, after a falling out with the film’s director, he went to a wolf den and apologized while his dog hid under his truck.

I poked around and found out that he had recently died, but had left behind a huge trove of work.  I started with the book of novellas that had made him famous, “Legends of the Fall,” and my brain lit up like a christmas tree.  Now, wherever I go, I hear radio stories about him, or see reruns of food shows with cameos of him.

Jim Harrison’s writing is beautiful, and I’m still trying to figure out what makes it so good.  He is brilliant at narrative summary, and has written entire books of it.  His sentences are long and beautiful without fancy ticks and curly cues.

Also, there’s something about the way he lived his life.  He gave himself up to life and to writing with an almost spiritual passion.  He gave himself up to love and to hunting and fishing and to food and drink.  He looked like he lived hard, and his early death (Is 78 early?  To my grandmother, 90 was early.) may speak to that.

I feel like something  is trying to give me a hint, and even the ghost of Jim Harrison, at least his authorial voice and amusing video image, is tapping me on the shoulder about something that I’m just a little too slow on the uptake to get.

I hope I figure it out before too long.

I know we have to eat to live, but I want to live to eat.  

At the same time, I don’t want to clog my arteries, blow up my sugar count, and make my heart explode.  It’s difficult.  You see, I’ve been programmed to want fat and sugar in some deep reptile part of my brain so much that I’m ready to fight off a saber tooth tiger for its kill to get a piece of that nice buttery mastodon belly.  

Unfortunately for me, these days I can pick up a decent mastodon belly in most supermarkets near my house and there are no more saber toothed tigers to make it even sporting.  My reptile brain couldn’t care less about the lack of competitive predators, so it’s way too easy to go to the Safeway and return to my cave with armloads of crap that will kill me, slowly, but thoroughly.

I can’t outwit my reptile brain.  It’s older and more primitive than the rest of my head parts.  I just need to plan, plan, plan what I want, and hope that I can stick to my plan, despite the howling in my head that happens every time I pass the cake-cookie-candy, deep fried chicken/steak/what-have-you, salty snacks now with extra salt aisles.

Maybe my plan will work.  On the other hand, there’s that Mike Tyson quote:  “Everyone has a plan ‘till they get punched in the mouth.”

If I can just avoid Mike Tyson, maybe I’ll be okay.