Should I Have Tried a Limerick Rhyming “Gurgle” with “Burgle"?

Yesterday was a shitty day.

I went to another funeral. A friend and colleague’s father fell ill a few weeks ago and passed away on Tuesday. Even though the service was three hours away, I decided to attend. I worried my friend would feel alone during this difficult time, and if a few hours in the car was all it took to show a little support, then it seemed the least I could do.

Bump and Lumpyhead were going to accompany me, (I mean, com’on: a toddler, a six-hour car ride, and a solemn, tearful event scheduled right smack dab in the middle of naptime? What could go wrong?) but I ended up going by myself. It’s not that I came to my senses about the plan to take Lumpyhead, (“We could go to Monticello after the funeral. And there will be farm stands along the way, we can buy pumpkins and pick apples! It will be an Autumnal Road Trip, the envy of scrapbookers everywhere.”) rather, we had a plumbing emergency that required the involvement of a professional.

I was saved from my own stupidity by a clogged drain.

For the past couple weeks, the tub has been making ominous gurgling noises when we flush the toilet. We addressed this problem in the usual fashion: by muttering “that can’t be good,” shrugging, and walking away. We eventually switched tactics from Ignore Ignore Ignore to Liquid Plumber Down the Tub plus Plunger in the Toilet along with a sprinkling of Hopeful Incantations. Shockingly, that didn’t work either. (You’d think that a haiku containing the words “flush, toilet, drain, and shower” would do the trick, but no.) We called a plumber and $250 later, we’ve got a shower that drains and a toilet that flushes. I think Bump might have paid $250 simply to avoid taking Lumpyhead on the Autumnal Road Trip/Funeral Trek of Doom, but we got working plumbing for that price too. Bonus.

Because of the midday “strange man in the bathroom making lots of noise” activity, Lumpyhead napped late, so when I got home we decided to go out to eat. We went to a Salvadoran place close to the house, where I once had a dish so hot it made the back of my eyeballs hurt. I keep ordering it, but it hasn’t been that hot since, and I’m always a wee bit disappointed.

We ordered plantains and flan for Lumpyhead, thinking he could also have bites from our plates. He rejected both of his dishes, of course, instead only opting to eat the maraschino cherry from the flan and the tomato and beets from our salads. He also ate some yucca and sucked on the lime from Bump’s beer. That kid is a little weird.

Afterward, I decided I needed some pie, so we went to the diner next door. When I was about halfway through the pie, Lumpyhead dropped a deuce most pungent. There was no changing table in the mens room (I never thought to look in the ladies room, I was focused on pie) so Bump took him outside, where Lumpyhead’s bottom continued to rumble and Bump’s eyes continued to water. We had to drive home with the windows open.

For a shit-themed day, it actually wasn’t so horrible. The trip to the funeral was quite pretty, it was a sunny day and the leaves are turning. The funeral was sad, but since I didn’t know the deceased I didn’t feel as though my insides had been ripped out. The worst part for me was when, during the VFW’s graveside service (the deceased was a WWII veteran), I realized similar rituals were probably being observed all around the country. Rituals not for eighty-year old men who had lived full lives, with caskets surrounded by grandchildren and frail friends; instead for men younger than me who had so much more life to live, with caskets surrounded by parents and grandparents and friends who can still easily sleep off a two-day drinking bender.

My toilet flushes reliably, and I didn’t have to change Lumpyhead’s Level 2 Code Brown. Bump did it, imploring the little guy to find some middle ground between a poop every two weeks and thrice-daily old man hobo shits.

It was a pretty good shitty day.