My oldest son gave me a spa package for Christmas this year. I looked at the gift card then back at him and could only say one word. “Oh.” In my forty-plus years I’d never been anywhere near a spa. Besides massages, I didn’t even know what you did in a place like that. But my sweet son was so excited to give his mother a special treat of relaxation that I had to go despite my fears of what might happen in this “spa.”

My worst fear was realized when a woman took me to a locker room and told me to undress and put on a robe. I stood there after she left for like five minutes. Holy crap, I have to get naked?

Steeling up my courage, I did as she instructed and found my way back to the meditation room to wait my turn, for whatever they would do to me next. And still not relaxed one bit.

A woman comes and takes me to a room with a large table and a fake waterfall running on the far wall. She tells me to take off my robe and get under the sheet draped over the table. “Your masseuse, Brett, will be in shortly.”

She had already closed the door before the name registered anything. Brett was a man’s name! I was supposed to lay naked under a sheet for a man I’d never met? Yeah, still so not relaxed.

I scurry out of my robe and get under the sheet, my face turned toward the closed door in fear. The dreaded knock finally comes and in walks a man with dark glasses and the white cane of a blind person.

My nerves are unable to stop my loud, audible sigh.

“Are you all right, ma’am?”

“Oh, yes. I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but my forty-year-old body is so glad right now that you are blind.” Yep, this is what nerves do to me, turn me into a blabbing idot. “You see…I’ve never done this before and my son sent me here as a Christmas present.”

The man chuckled. “Ah…I see. I promise to do my best to make this as relaxing of an experience for you as possible.”

And did he deliver? Oh yes he did. I would have no qualms about doing that again. Having my body rubbed into a floppy jello state is an amazing experience. Yeah, I left there relaxed.