My father likes to sing -- in the shower, on the street, wherever -- and the strangest songs, too. One is a tune from his childhood, which I believe is the song from the
Roy Rogers Show of the 1950s:
Happy trails to you, until we meet again.
Happy trails to you, keep smilin' until then.
Who cares about the clouds when we're together?
Just sing a song and bring the sunny weather.
Happy trails to you, 'till we meet again.
I've never seen the show nor heard the song in its original form, but the fact that I can quote these lines verbatim should tell you how often he sings them. "Sings" is perhaps an inaccurate word here. I'm at a loss for a simile to describe how bad he sounds. Nails on blackboard, maybe? Tortured mountain goat?
But for all the years my father has mangled his song, Roy got his revenge on my father -- and in a most ironic way, too. The weather was anything but sunny, and the trail my father left was most assuredly not of the happy kind. You'll forgive me if the details of this story are sketchy or inconsistent -- this happened almost twenty years ago.
Why we were out on the road in a snowstorm, my parents and I, when anyone with a modicum of sanity would have stayed in, is anyone's guess. We were on way back home when they decided to pull into a shopping area and wait out the rest of the storm in a Roy Rogers restaurant. I don't recall what my father ate, but I remember that it was very saucy and brown. It must have had barbecue sauce on it. Thick brown sauces made by unfamiliar hands had always given my father a bad time, but he was undaunted. It's clear that common sense was not ruling that day.
We sat in there for over an hour. When we finally left, the snow had stopped, but the roads were treacherous. It was impossible to drive faster than, say, five m.p.h. We crawled along. We were less than a mile from home when something new began to sound along with the grind of the tired against the snow. Crunch... brrrrrap... crunch... brrrrrap. My mother and I looked at each other in horror -- years of experience told us that there were minutes, even seconds, until a new storm would blow in. We might as well have been a hundred miles from home.
General panic ensued. "Hold it in!" shouted my mother.
There's that urban legend claiming that if everyone in a stadium envisions one particular thing, that thing will happen. I don't know about that, but on the day in question three people concentrated all of their the mental energies on keeping one faltering sphincter from bursting. We tried, but in vain. My father wasn't going to make it.
He turned off the main commercial street on to a residential one and got out. Why he decided to leave the car is unknown. Perhaps it was a courtesy to my mother and me; but from my perspective, it was too little, too late. Courtesy -- or reason, at the very least -- would have entailed not eating the troublesome food product from the start.
Leaving the car door open, he leaned against the driver's side doorframe, doubled over. My mother offered more superfluous commentary: "Don't make it obvious!" There could have been no doubt as to what was happening. But he went and squatted down by one of the tires, as if examining a blow-out -- again, ironic, considering what was going on his pants. Whether he sighed from pain, embarrassment, or relief -- or a combination thereof -- is another mystery for the ages.
He came back to the car and resumed driving. The rest of that trip home was as silent as the snow-laden streets. The acrid smell, magnified in the close, heated air of the car, bore witness to the catastrophe.
Sensitive and hypercritical adolescent that I was, I just could not deal with this, or them, anymore. When we got home, I ran up to my room and holed out there for a good couple of hours.
My poor mother had to deal with the aftermath. Unfair, to say the least, but I'll refrain from making any feminist remarks here. I have never asked for specifics, to save my mother from having to relive the event, and also to save myself some shame. When you're a teenager and you see a parent poop his pants, it's not great for the psyche. But I know that the jeans went through a number of cycles in the machine and some hand-washing before they were wearable again. The underpants, naturally, went in the garbage. The driver's seat, and indeed the entire interior of the car, got a thorough scrubbing. Props to her -- she made him do that part.
Days later, when the snow and ice had melted somewhat and it was safe to drive, there was, inexplicably, still a shit smell in the car. After some investigation, my mother found the towel he had used to clean off the shit from the seat rolled up in a corner on the floor. It hadn't occurred to him to throw it out.
-- Shatty Cake
