Mimi is one of my best friends. She is my gramma on my mother's side, and I love her dearly, totally, and unconditionally. We've shared a great deal, regardless of the generation gap. Seeing as she had my mother young, who in turn had me young, we'll hopefully be able to maintain our relationship for many years to come. What I'm delicately trying to say is that if she can hang on and not croak for a bit, then we'll continue sharing in each other's lives, if only through phone calls and packages.

We live on opposite sides of the country, and she's got lung cancer. Time is ruthlessly short.

Once every couple of weeks, I call her at the nice assisted living place in which she's taken residence to talk about whatever's new. The past couple of conversations have been about a certain unnamed relative who owes someone money and another certain unnamed relative who not only fought off the latest attempt to have her placed in a nursing home but also called her daughter a fucking expletive in front of said daughter's workmates. Mimi laughed with me about it, but remarked that leaving one's home behind is a somber thing.

Why am I telling you this? Because I wanted you to know the origin of the weirdest conversation we've ever had -- the one that caused me to sit back and contemplate whether I became a PoopReporter for different reasons than I'd otherwise considered.

This last phone call started like any other, as I said. Deadbeat relative, crazy relative, what the Things are up to, and how much fun Mimi is having with her new boyfriend, a veteran who was at Iwo Jima. The topics were meandering and I was finishing up some soup on the stove when she began to discuss the toilet in her old house, which she'd just sold at an ass-reaming price. "It seems that the people who bought my house have to do major renovations in the bathroom because they just found the floor is almost completely rotten."

"No way," I remarked. "I always thought it was in great shape, even up until the last time I visited you."

She corrected me. "Me too, Daphne, but I guess the floor was about ready to give way when it sold. They're going to have to redo everything."

That this happened seemed almost fair. The people who purchased her home held her over hot coals because they knew she needed to sell quickly. Ha, I thought. Karma. "Well, better that they didn't find out before the sale was final, huh?"

"Yes," she agreed. And then dropped the bomb. "And I know exactly what caused it, too. It was that one time your brother clogged the toilet. It overflowed all over the floor and leaked all the way down to the pool table in the basement."

Come again?

"Daphne, don't you remember? It was the only time in the thirty years that I lived there that there was a bathroom incident. No, I'm sure it was from your brother."

I thought about it. And sure enough, the incident broke the surface of my memory like a severed foot disturbing the placid mirror of Crystal Lake. What came to mind first was the water-damaged ceiling tile above the near left corner of the pool table. Then, slowly, I began to have more memories: of my brother, and of moments when he would sheepishly pop his head out of the blue bathroom we shared and tell my mother something in a hushed tone. I remembered her reaction to be consistent: she'd slump her shoulders and say either, "Jesus Christ" or "I'll get your father."

My father's reaction was never that mundane. He'd go on about my brother's turds with little restraint. I can even remember the sucking noise our plunger made in the background of my father's bitching. The image of my brother sitting on his bed or standing in the hall, waiting for some type of release command, materialized a bit later. It sounds weird, sure, to picture a teenager boy standing at attention while his organic festering were attended to; but I can assure you that if he left the house or went to his room before my father was done with the plunger, it would have been seen as a crime of disrespect.

I'd forgotten almost all of this until Mimi brought up the damaged bathroom.

"What happened on that day?"

"Well," she started, "he told me he had clogged the toilet. And boy did he! It was huge." I didn't need clarification as to what was huge.

"We mopped up as much of the water as we could, but apparently we didn't get it all. It must have sat there all these years, slowly rotting the wood between the floors."

"Is it possible that you've had a leak all these years instead, Mimi?" I asked.

"Oh no, sweetie, that house was built by one of the best men in town. Most of it was custom-made. The only trouble we ever had was on that day."

"Now that you've brought it up, I kind of remember my brother having, um, huge shits. I'm beginning to remember that he clogged the toilet a lot."

"Well, sure he did. It drove your father crazy. In fact, it got to the point that he gave your brother one of your mother's knitting needles to poke at it when he was in there, to break it up so it'd flush."

What? Bro had a Poo Stick? We had a Poo Stick in our house all those years and I didn't know about it? What kind of bullshit was this? I'm a fucking PoopReporter, for God's sake; how the hell did this go unremembered? I had to get clarification.

"Mimi," I began, "are you telling me that my father gave my brother one of my mother's knitting needles to keep in our bathroom for the specific purpose of breaking up his turds so he could flush them?"

"Yes, that's exactly what I'm telling you. And had I known about your brother earlier, I'd have given him one of mine!"

This remark caused the both of us to giggle uncontrollably. After we got our breath, it hit me -- these memories. "I bet it was blue."

As she recovered from the giggle fit, she asked, "Why?" "Because," I said, "there was only one blue knitting needle in my mother's knitting basket in the living room."

Then it occurred to me that our bathroom was blue and that my mother is on the anal retentive side; had she color-coordinated the Poo Stick to the wallpaper even though it was hidden from view? And how long had my brother been a Poo-Breaker? Was this something that ran in our family? Did my other gramma show the possible Poo-Breaker gene the time I ate the penny and she went spoolunking for it in the toilet [1]?

The implications where overwhelming. It also occurred to me that I might have come from one sneaky, Shameful family, and the fact that what Mimi said was so new was because I had been the victim of some sort of forced forgetfulness or poop-repressed hypnotism. My mother had been so unrelenting in covering his mongo turds (and bedwetting -- he did that for years, but it was so taboo that it basically didn't exist) that these things were discouraged from my memory.

As a kid, I couldn't tease my brother about anything. He had no sense of humor whatsoever when it came to his faults -- a condition I'll blame on my father's incessant teasing. Had I remarked about him clogging the toilet, I would have gotten clobbered. It occurred to me at this point that people who can't laugh at themselves suck, but the people who make them this way suck more. Poor Bro.

"Boy, was my family was fucked up." There, I dropped the F-bomb on my Mimi. I'm surely now going to Hell.

She gasped, age-appropriately. "Daphne!"

Things that happened in our family were sent into purgatory if they weren't suitable for social discussion. Sometimes I wonder if I actually was a kid in that family, or if was bought as a kit later on and reprogrammed to replace the original Daphne. I bet they killed her for being too snoopy and buried her in the sump pump in the basement, and that's why we weren't allowed to play near it.

While we were on the subject of poop, I took advantage and asked Mimi about my father's bowel obstruction. She told me he confessed that the doctor used a spoon to dig out the poop cork, which was good for another fit of giggles. She said it was probably some operating tool, and I told her it also could have been from the Dairy Queen up the street. We laughed about the fact that my father said that after the poop cork was popped, he spewed crap all over the room like a horizontal shit fountain.

We talked about diapers, toilets, Karma, and how weird it is that these memories were downright absent from the past twenty-five years of my life. "I wonder what else there is to remember," I told her. "Maybe I'll get lucky and remember someone crapping their pants at one of the family reunions." (As it is, the only juicy memory I have from a reunion was my father backing our orange 1973 Chrysler into a tree and then yelling at the rest of us because somehow it was our fault -- it certainly wasn't the six pack of Blatz he'd laid waste to after the annual softball game.)

After we hung up, I thought about what an unusual conversation we'd had and why the topic of poop had surfaced at all. Then I remembered: when I called, she picked up the phone, told me to hang on, and came back after about two minutes. I think she was on the toilet. It would explain what sounded like flush seconds before she picked back up and asked me how things were. Plain old timing may have triggered one of the most interesting phone calls we've ever had. At least it was one of the funniest.

I know my gramma will be gone some day, and that's hard to think about. I'm thirty-nine years old and this woman has been a force in my life since day one. To consider life without her at the other end of the phone, to realize I'll never hug her again? Bleak.

It's unavoidable, though. Time waits for no pooper. My life will go on without her, some day; but for now I'm fortunate. She's continues to surprise me, year after year, with revelations about my childhood, with things that I'd never really forgotten but had just put aside in my mind. She is my wrinkly frail catalyst: gentle in nature but fierce in spirit, always there, somehow filling in the holes that have plagued me when I let them. Over the years she helped me get sober when I got pregnant without even knowing it. She created a home for me when I was afraid to be alone in my apartment. We've had sleepovers, the two of us: a strung-out twenty-two-year-old party animal and a tragically-hip, sixty-something hot gramma.

To think that this woman, after all these years, not only held the key as to why poop humor has always held me rapt but would also accidentally explain it after I'd become a steady contributor to the internet's number one resource for number two humor is comforting -- one of those small signs that the universe does indeed make sense.

I hung up the phone feeling bunny-fuzzy and loved, like I do every time I speak to my Mimi. Only this time, I also felt a little more properly-placed in the universe. I felt like someone had previously shoved me in a puzzle because I was supposed to fit and didn't, and she was the one who saw I only needed to be turned clockwise and re-inserted. Meaning she always knew I was in the right place but needed a little direction. Always. Instinctively.

As I turned from the phone to serve the Things their dinner, it occurred to me that I could some day be the older woman talking on the phone to one of my kids' children.

Later, I hid my knitting needles.