So I was in the ladies room just before, here at school, the one downstairs from the library, once again feeling annoyed because this is a bathroom designed to be handicapped accessible, which is all well and good, but for me, it means that my feet barely touch the floor. What if someone's handicap was, say, dwarfism? I find a lot of handicapped-adapted places ridiculous, because they all seem to assume that there are only two handicaps worth adapting for: people in wheelchairs, and the blind. The blind are accommodated because all signs (for example, Ladies Room) are also in braille. This is even more absurd, because how would they even know where to feel along the wall to find the sign they can read? Anyway, the point of a high toilet is so that people can easily transfer to it from a wheelchair. Again, all well and good, but the door is so heavy (since it has to be a fireproof steel door), that no one in a wheelchair could even open it, let alone anyone on crutches, which I know first hand.
Anyway, so there I am, and I'm reminded of a bit that was on last week's episode of Two and a Half Men. In brief, Alan had moved out and sent a list of which of his things he wanted Charlie to bring him, and on the list was "the footstool in the bathroom," followed by Alan's explanation that the footstool raised his feet and helped produce bowel movements. I almost fell right on the floor laughing.
Now, probably every mother knows that if your baby is straining to -- let's be frank -- take a dump, you can hold your hand pressed gently against their feet, giving them a bit of traction, or resistance, or whatever, and voila. It's the same principle as the footstool, which my mother discovered, to her delight.
There was a small footstool in my sister's bathroom, and then in my mother's, because my sister had little boys who had to stand on it to pee into the toilet, otherwise they wouldn't have been tall enough. Well, the boys are now 35 and 31, and we all still have footstools in our bathrooms, because, hey, good idea. In her last years, my mother basically lived for regular elimination, and the stool was her friend. Supposedly, the stool in my bathroom is there because my little girls used it to climb onto the toilet when they were small, but hey, you know, 28 and 25, so somebody's living in a fool's paradise here.
Anyway, when we were cleaning out my parents' apartment after my father died, we got to the bathroom, and K said "What should we do with the stool stool?" Which is, really, a much, much better name for it than the "poop stool," don't ya think? Clever? I'm surprised no TV writer came up with that.
Grandma's stool stool is in a box of her stuff in my basement (because to do otherwise would have meant that I was throwing something out, which I do not do, generally), and sadly, even I, although a member in good standing of the Poop Club, whose rules are
The first rule of poop club is, don't talk about poop! (As my mother constantly did.) Because it turns out that Shirl's problem, aside from the OCD and the bipolarism and, of course, the cancer and osteoporosis, was that the woman had intestines that should have gone to the Mayo Clinic for study. Yes, she wrecked them with the obsessive need to medicate them into perfection, but they weren't so good to start with, I guess. I guess this because, yes, we've all got them, too.
The second rule of poop club is, it's okay to talk to your Sibs about poop. Not obsessively, mind you, or in detail.
The third rule of poop club, it now seems, is, it's okay to talk to your mom about poop. A kid away at college and sick as a ... well, grandma, needs to ask "What should I take now?"
The fourth rule of poop club is, what did it really matter if Shirl needed to talk about poop? We were her daughters, after all. As for those other people (everyone she knew), hey, they could have hung up the phone. Right?
even I will not go so far as to bring a stool stool into the little handicapped/faculty bathroom downstairs from the library. I mean, I have my standards.
TWO AND A HALF MEN :: ENTRY #1980
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