Some time ago I read a brilliant article about pee. Its genius oozed from its originality.
Yesterday I sat in a windowless theater room in a school with about thirty other teachers as part of my training with Hartford Public Schools. Near the end of the session we were talking about the pros and cons of assigned seating. A new (to Hartford) teacher raised his wrinkled hand and admitted that he felt “insecure” upon entering the room nearly three hours ago, as he “didn’t know where to sit.”
I had entered the room with similar pause, though mine stemmed from my desire to sit next to friends and thus avoid the uncomfortable stir that I feel when discussing weighty subjects with perfect strangers.
A man with wisps of greys just above his sideburns left the room at 10:35 a.m., five minutes past halfway through the session. He returned three minutes later, but something was funny about his stride; it was different than the one he’d used to carry himself from the room not two hundred seconds before.
I’ve gone to the bathroom a lot. On more than one occasion, I haven’t washed my hands. On those occasions, I always fear I’ll have to shake or touch hands with someone right after I make my exit from the peaceful privacy and reenter the social world. I always fear that they’ll notice my dry hands—dryness that will not match the expected moistness of just-lathered palms.
Most of the time I do wash my hands, but even then things can go awry. Some sinks, for reasons beyond my plumbing capacity, retch water at an alarmingly rapid rate. The mean stream will ricochet off the porcelain (or whatever the sink is made of) and droplets can spray in unintended directions. One such direction is invariably at you.
The man who left the theater room at 10:35 a.m., and later returned after one can only suppose a trip to the bathroom, walked in with a dead-looking right arm, which seemed to be causing his awkward stride. I noticed the injury and immediately made a mental note not to choose him should I be elected captain of a spontaneously organized dodgeball game.
I wondered how he hurt the extremity. A wet floor? Exceptionally tricky-to-flush urinal? Last night’s arm-wrestling tournament that I wasn’t invited to? Nothing made sense until it all made sense. As the guy strained my way, I saw it. There, just to the right of his khaki-pant zipper, was a wet spot. The guy had been trying to shield it with his right hand as he made his way from doorway to seat. But in the process, his cover had worked as a magnifier. Rather than assume most folks in the room wouldn’t affix their gazes to his V-berth (a sailing term that will make my Dad proud), he feared just that, and felt it necessary to try to hide the splotch of liquid.
I know what happened. As we were in a middle school, the sinks only come up to about mid-thigh on an average-sized human. The water pressure was fierce, the spray merciless, and it wet his crotch without apology. He swore, his mind assuming that anyone who saw his personal scarlet letter would think it pee. They’d think that, after his forty-some years of practice, he still couldn’t contain his own stream. But really, he couldn’t contain the sink’s.
But had he walked in normally, had he returned with the same gait as when he’d left the room, I wouldn’t have noticed the blemish at his crotch. And even if I had, I wouldn’t have cared.
Yesterday I sat in a windowless theater room in a school with about thirty other teachers as part of my training with Hartford Public Schools. Near the end of the session we were talking about the pros and cons of assigned seating. A new (to Hartford) teacher raised his wrinkled hand and admitted that he felt “insecure” upon entering the room nearly three hours ago, as he “didn’t know where to sit.”
I had entered the room with similar pause, though mine stemmed from my desire to sit next to friends and thus avoid the uncomfortable stir that I feel when discussing weighty subjects with perfect strangers.
A man with wisps of greys just above his sideburns left the room at 10:35 a.m., five minutes past halfway through the session. He returned three minutes later, but something was funny about his stride; it was different than the one he’d used to carry himself from the room not two hundred seconds before.
I’ve gone to the bathroom a lot. On more than one occasion, I haven’t washed my hands. On those occasions, I always fear I’ll have to shake or touch hands with someone right after I make my exit from the peaceful privacy and reenter the social world. I always fear that they’ll notice my dry hands—dryness that will not match the expected moistness of just-lathered palms.
Most of the time I do wash my hands, but even then things can go awry. Some sinks, for reasons beyond my plumbing capacity, retch water at an alarmingly rapid rate. The mean stream will ricochet off the porcelain (or whatever the sink is made of) and droplets can spray in unintended directions. One such direction is invariably at you.
The man who left the theater room at 10:35 a.m., and later returned after one can only suppose a trip to the bathroom, walked in with a dead-looking right arm, which seemed to be causing his awkward stride. I noticed the injury and immediately made a mental note not to choose him should I be elected captain of a spontaneously organized dodgeball game.
I wondered how he hurt the extremity. A wet floor? Exceptionally tricky-to-flush urinal? Last night’s arm-wrestling tournament that I wasn’t invited to? Nothing made sense until it all made sense. As the guy strained my way, I saw it. There, just to the right of his khaki-pant zipper, was a wet spot. The guy had been trying to shield it with his right hand as he made his way from doorway to seat. But in the process, his cover had worked as a magnifier. Rather than assume most folks in the room wouldn’t affix their gazes to his V-berth (a sailing term that will make my Dad proud), he feared just that, and felt it necessary to try to hide the splotch of liquid.
I know what happened. As we were in a middle school, the sinks only come up to about mid-thigh on an average-sized human. The water pressure was fierce, the spray merciless, and it wet his crotch without apology. He swore, his mind assuming that anyone who saw his personal scarlet letter would think it pee. They’d think that, after his forty-some years of practice, he still couldn’t contain his own stream. But really, he couldn’t contain the sink’s.
But had he walked in normally, had he returned with the same gait as when he’d left the room, I wouldn’t have noticed the blemish at his crotch. And even if I had, I wouldn’t have cared.