No: This is not about Levi, Duke, Obie, and Lawrence, the “Four Tops” of R&B fame. This is about the two toilet tops.
My youngest granddaughter, five years old, climbs from the toilet seat, rearranges her clothing, and looks at me: “Put the top down?” I nod, and she does, then flushes the toilet. I oversee her cleansing process, which Myah has summarized as “sanitize for pee, soap for poop.” But just as important in the bathroom routine is the handling of the toilet tops.
My eldest child was five-and-a-half years old, and still grumpy about her parents dragging her from her friends in Madera, California to a new home in Clarksville, Indiana, when she came boiling out of the half-bath on the main floor of the house her family had moved her into. She was wet from waist to knee. “Mom!” she bawled. “Tell dad to put the top down!” Lisa, as was her wont, had waited until the last second to go to the bathroom and had flown backward into the facility, dropped her drawers, and touched down into the bowl.
This event happened circa 1978 and I have never again, left the top up on the toilet. The memory of that “splashdown” also helped me to formulate a teaching guide for Lisa’s brother, born 14 years and one wife after her. I told Chris that, when going to the bathroom, he must first put the two tops up, then the two tops down. Chris embraced the exercise, for he loved to slam the two tops. When I heard the “bang-bang” of the toilet tops and the sound of rushing water, I knew that he had done what he should have, in the bathroom. When I spoke to my son about what he remembered about the bathroom instructions, he chuckled. “Yeah: 2TU and 2TD.”
I cannot remember where I saw it, or if I read about it, but some source informed me that the action of a flushing toilet tosses minute droplets of water into the air; these droplets will contain bacteria from the toilet. This information convinced me to be a diehard “top-downer,” and Myah, when she visits with me, adheres to the rule. During a recent sojourn to the home of my female friend in Southern Indiana, I found the top up in the half-bath outside her master bedroom, a sign that our common friend — female as well — had recently visited the facility. A man’s visit to a restroom will often require that both tops be raised, whereas a woman’s visit will only need one of those tops to come up. When I visit my daughter in New Jersey, her two children — now 19 and 14 years-old — will both leave the top up after using the facility. When an emergency requires that I visit the parents’ bathroom, I always find the top up.
The “tops” I refer to are actually “the seat” — the open oval — and “the lid.” The top that I replace before flushing is the lid that covers the oval, the top that Myah has learned to close before flushing. At least, she does when she is with me. We men are notorious for our lack of accuracy and aim, a lesson that I learned in the early 70s — before “family” restrooms — when I had to take my 2-year-old daughter into the men’s room. After hustling her past the occupied urinals, she had to do the “peepee dance” until I had swabbed the entire stall. But I have broken from the group, and I adhere to the rule:
Two tops up; two tops down.
cjon3acd@att.net