One Sunday afternoon early in our marriage
…which I ordinarily think of as a journey of two children growing up together,
one a little slower than the other … the
two of us hadn't gotten very far south on our return trip from Watertown before
snow and traffic accidents forced everyone off the road. But my wife and I were
welcomed into the living room of a very nice older couple who fed us cookies
and coffee for over two hours. People were more pleasant back then as well as
trusting.
When the siren wailed on the New York State
Police cruiser, it signaled the highway was now open again. We promised the couple to stop back in the
future and in fact exchanged Christmas cards for two years. The Interstate was still closed, but traffic
began to move again on the two-lane Route 11.
We were soon headed south from the little village of Mannsville.
We
crept along at a snail's pace in a long line of slipping and sliding cars and were
a couple of miles south of town when Mrs. Dave made her announcement.
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
I should not have been surprised, after the
coffee from our visit. Women were not
made to hold a lot of coffee, I think.
When God finished up installing all the equipment needed for carrying,
delivering and nurturing babies, plus a temporary amount of space for
constantly gaining and losing weight, there wasn’t a lot of room left over.
God’s assistant, the Angel Anatomie, probably
told him, “You’re about 0.14 cubits short of the space you’ll need for a decent
size bladder.”
“Give her a smaller bladder,” said God, “and build
in the need to fix her makeup all the
time with the other girls. At least that’ll keep her near a bathroom.”
“You knew you were
going to come up short of space,” said Anatomie. “You should have made her as
large as him.”
“No, he will need to
carry her sometimes,” said God. “And she
will need to be short enough to listen to his heart beneath his bluster.”
My wife suggested I take her back to Mannsville and find a bathroom.
“Hell,” I said, “we’re in the middle of a
blizzard and I don't know if I can do a 3 point turn in this line of cars. And when we go back we'll be at the end of
the line and that will add hours to the trip.”
I was
exaggerating, as usual, to impress the lady with the importance of my
point. It didn't work then and it doesn’t
now. You'd think I would have quickly learned
that, but fifty odd years later I still haven’t.
Spotting a Greyhound bus up ahead, I suggested
she just walk up the line of cars, bang on the bus door and ask to use their
rest room. You can imagine her response.
“No problem,” I said. “I’ll personally go
handle the negotiation with the bus driver if you’ll take the wheel while I
walk up ahead.”
She said she had no intention of getting on a
bus full of strangers just to use the crapper.
I pointed out strangers were probably the best kind of people to do that
among.
“You’ll never see them again,” I said.
“This is crazy,” she said.
“No, no, this is perfect. The people on the bus won’t even know why you
boarded.”
“Until I head for the rest room.”
“Tell them you’re a fireman,” I said, “stopping
to check the inspection date on the fire extinguishers.”
“In the middle of a blizzard?”
“Overtime!
You needed the overtime!”
“Are you for—“
“Or … here, take this,” I said, pulling the
ash tray from beneath the dash. “Tell
them you’re collecting for UNICEF.”
At this point she said a bad word.
“It’s for the children,” I said.
I
should have long ago learned when to pull the reins up short on a horse that wasn’t
going anywhere. Fifty odd years later I
still haven’t mastered the trick.
“I’ll empty the ash tray,” I said.
I didn’t need to turn toward her to see the
glaring look on her face. I could feel
it.
“OK then, the lady fireman,” I said. “If you pull
your coat collar up —“
She said another bad word.
Executing a 3 point turn in a raging blizzard
is not easy, but twenty minutes later we were back in Mannsville. Our friendly older couple lived on the other
side of the village, so we stopped at the General Store and Mrs. Dave ran quickly
to the rest room. Ten minutes later we
were back on the road. The sun had come
out, the plows had achieved some success and traffic was moving along at an almost
brisk pace.
We followed the
Greyhound all the way to Syracuse,
slowing to a stop two or three times, only three cars behind the bus. Each time
I was tempted to get out and run up and ask the bus driver if I could use the
bathroom, because now all the coffee from our visit was beginning to work on me. It would have been a dramatic statement to my
wife on the efficacy of my original thinking.
But alas, I was too embarrassed to bang on the bus door and ask to use
their bathroom.
Some of my greatest ideas over the years have
appeared to me even better when I asked someone else to try them first. But in my long years of marriage I’ve at
least learned who not to ask.
Copyright by David Griffin, 2016
The
Windswept Press
Murrells Inlet, South
Carolina
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