My column “Water Works” (Weekly View, January 5, 2024) produced at least one chuckle, and that chuckler suggested that I continue the theme for a few more columns. False modesty demanded that I decry the thought: “No, no,” I cried, and sat down to write.
When my first child was about 4 years old, her mother went back to school to get a Master of Business Administration degree. The university that Cathy attended was a distance from our home in Madera, California, and she was required to be away from Sunday morning to Thursday night. Our daughter Lisa was a three and in daycare while I worked. We shopped together, and in the early 1970s, there were no family restrooms. When she had to “go potty,” I picked her up and hustled her into the men’s room, shielding her face from the men at the urinals. I would take her into a stall, then go grab a 20-foot roll of paper towels, wet some and soap some, then swab down the entire stall. Lisa would do the pee-pee dance as I did this. I then created the “suspension hands” that kept her from contact with the toilet seat as she urinated. Years later, I took Lisa’s brother and sister on a float trip with my friends in Missouri. When the group tied up at a landing, Lauren lamented not being a boy as Chris went behind a tree to pee. My friends — both female — took up the flag and took Lauren into the bushes and demonstrated the proper drawer drop and squat. Set free the pee.
My first two children were female, and I learned that the diapers that swaddled their booties were to be folded so that they were thicker in the rear. When my son was born, I was a veteran of about 16 years of girl diaper changing. No one told me that, when you open a boy-child’s diaper, you must “duck and cover.” I learned, though, when the cool air of an opened diaper caused my son to whizz on me. In a recent conversation with my friend Nancy, she told me of helping a friend care for two 4-month-old boys, and laughing that her two girls never whizzed on her when she opened their diapers.
I was sitting with Paula Nicewanger, co-owner, and Creative Director of this publication, at our favorite watering hole, when the subject of whizzing came up. Overhearing our conversation, a server cried out, “Oh my!” She then went on to recount an incident of “Pyramid Pee” that centered around her. I told Morgen Parks that I wouldn’t name her, but she insisted on claiming her moment of whizzery.
Morgen was a member of the cheerleading squad in middle school, and one spring day, the team was outside the school, working on a human pyramid. Morgen was on the second row of the pyramid, and as they struggled to maintain their balance, screaming broke out from some of the team members: A wasp had flown into the gathering. As she listened to the screeching, Morgen broke into laughter, an outpour (get it? “outpour?”) of hilarity that resulted in her voiding her bladder onto the boy below her. After the pyramid had splashed to the ground, the boy wondered aloud, “Why is my shirt wet?”
Everyone has a tale to tell of the normal human function of elimination. One of our readers e-mailed me recently to say that “with regard to … women who go to the bathroom while on the phone, I don’t stand for that.”
No comment on “stand.”
cjon3acd@att.net