My birthday happens to fall on December 26. So I really lose. I don't get the satisfaction of being a Christmas baby (and all the resulting attention) -- instead, my big day happens to fall on the day when most people are driving back to Bumstuck, Kentucky, in their vomit-green minivans, trying to pull into a Stuckey's. I even remember eating a birthday dinner of a creamed turkey open sandwich with moldy bread at a Howard Johnson's on one unusually desperate homeward trek from my Uncle Ollie's radioactive house on the outskirts of Three Mile Island. (I'm not kidding).
Nobody ever remembers my birthday, except my mama. After thirty hours of labor, not much chance of her forgetting.
But there was ONE birthday that I'll never forget. Which brings us to the poop story.
I was just about to turn forty -- which didn't bother me at all. The other ladies in the office decided to actually REMEMBER my birthday, and so on December 23 during the lunch hour they all came running into the lunchroom and yelled SURPRISE!
And dang if I wasn't surprised! Somebody finally decided to give me some lovin'!
As my eyes filled with anticipation, I couldn't wait to find out what where I was going to be taken to lunch. I knew it wouldn't be the Chophouse -- too expensive. However, the TGI Friday's would do very nicely.
No dice.
The girls all looked back into the hallway and suddenly our boss (whom I will call Mr. Tudball) came carrying a giant meatloaf with forty candles blazing. The whole thing was steaming hot (there is a kitchen in another room with an oven), and when he sat it on the table, I could see that the giant greasy groundchuck surprise was shaped in the form of a Koala Bear. I know that sounds stupid, but I collect Koala Bears.
My eyes must have glazed over in shock and dismay. I know it sounds selfish and petty, but I REALLY wanted to go OUT to lunch. Not sit here in a pewter/mauve lunchroom with the sounds of metal presses operating just beyond the walls and try to swallow a few bites of a clammy and gristly meatloaf. But it's the thought that counts! In all seriousness, it really is the thought that counts -- but I hate meatloaf.
"Oh, I KNEW she'd love it," exclaimed Millie. My eyes began to water over as I smelled the musky remains of an obviously inbred cow that had been drinking pond water laced with anti-freeze in a junkyard for twenty years. It smelled like someone had cooked a parrot on the radiator of a thirty-eight-year-old overheated Carpenter bus, stuck it in a bottle of rotten feta cheese, and then sprinkled cedar shavings onto it. I felt my gag reflex kick in.
"Oh yes. I love meatloaf. Thank you for thinking about me, you guys!"
What I wanted to say was, "Carve some samples into a stainless disc and send it to the CDC in Atlanta!" But I smiled. I was touched. But I did NOT want to eat that thing.
Mr. Tudball heaped a giant section of the butt of the bear onto a plate and sat it in front of me. I willed my fork there, and shoveled a trollop of it into my mouth. It tasted worse than a garden hose sandwich.
"DELICIOUS," I said.
Here comes the awful part.
No more than five minutes after eating the Koala meatloaf (along with potato salad and squash casserole), I felt my sphincter send my medula oblongata a warning of severe toxic shock. The end of my butthole started buzzing like that little bell that goes off in a rental car that you can't shut off. And it kept buzzing for the next three days.
Every nerve in my anus was quivering worse than the nose hairs on Rosie O'Donnell's chihuahua. I spent that day, Christmas Day, and my birthday on the shuttle of mudlove.
Mr. Tudball and the rest of the women never knew that I almost died. My husband took me to the hospital in Harrisburg, and they didn't release me until four days later.
I never ate another bite of meatloaf in my life. The smell of it makes my anus quiver.