Back in my brief days as a twentysomething radio broadcaster, I encountered just such a long-winded and ever unfolding -- if somewhat unpoetic -- tale in the control room of the small-town Mississippi AM station where I worked. Told in daily installments by one of my fellow disc jockeys, it concerned his very pregnant wife who was making a different sort of pilgrimage: carrying her first child to term.

My co-worker's name was Ronnie. His wife, Shirley, was in her sixth month by the time I joined the station as on-air talent, as it's called in the business. Ronnie's morning drive slot immediately preceded mine, and since it is always prudent to come in a bit early to get psyched up for your show and anticipate any problems, I always kibitzed in the control room with Ronnie while he played his last couple of Top 40 hits. It was during these visits that, like it or not, I got a blow-by-blow account of Shirley's condition.

Since we're talking pilgrimages here, I'll use a travel analogy. It seems Shirley had been having internal combustion troubles since the fifth month, causing her to make frequent trips to her maternity mechanic to do something about those plugs. Two or three days of heavy-doodie carbon build-up were generally vanquished by one of those corrective, overnight engine additives, resulting in unrestricted exhaust pipe emissions that always overshadowed the activities of the little passenger trying to kick out the front grille from underneath the hood.

Dropping the analogy now, Shirley's troubles continued throughout the sixth month and into the seventh. I endured week after week of these rectal reports as she attempted again and again to make a successful daily, short-term pilgrimage to the potty. The eighth month turned out to be a doozy. Ronnie said she had gone an entire week without any relief. The mild laxatives she had been taking seemed to stop having any effect. She was now waddling around the house carrying fast-growing fraternal twins -- a pink one in her uterus and a brown one in her rectum. (Ronnie was hardly so poetic with his descriptions -- those are my words, with apologies to Chaucer again.)

One day I walked into the control room to find Ronnie giving me a thumbs up. The hangdog expression he had worn for months was replaced by something resembling jubilation. He greeted me with, "I thought Shirley would never stop shitting last night!"

Ronnie quickly explained that Shirley had stayed on the pot for about twenty minutes getting rid of a week-and-a-half worth of crap. It had just kept on coming and coming. Several feet of it, in his estimation, and neither one of them remembered her eating that much; but he guessed it really mounted up when you didn't get rid of it on a regular basis. He termed it her "big breakthrough."

Appropriate choice of words, I thought. Next came his explanation of what had finally done the trick. Out of desperation and on the recommendation of a friend, they had chosen to go to a chiropractor -- rather than their family physician -- about the problem. Ronnie said that the man had massaged Shirley's spinal column and back for a considerable length of time. Making adjustments, he had called it.

Though it sounded much like the sort of old wives' tale that might have been told on that famous pilgrimage to Canterbury, Ronnie insisted that the chiropractor had worked miracles where conventional medicine and exercises recommended by their physician had not. He said they were barely able to make it home before she was virtually camped out on the toilet for some much-needed relief.

This much I can tell you: Ronnie seemed almost as proud of his wife's ability to birth those long-awaited turds as he must have been later when she birthed their child. However, I quit that particular job shortly thereafter, having gotten a better offer from an FM station in New Orleans, so I never found out how Shirley fared with her other little pilgrim. I trust things went well.

I never met Shirley in person, and perhaps it was best that I didn't. I knew too much, and it wouldn't have been cool to let slip that I knew the most intimate details about her bowel habits. Of course, that was long before the days of PoopReport and before the formal concepts of Shameful and Shameless Shitting became a part of my thinking -- perhaps she might have been as proud of discussing getting over the hump of her dump as Ronnie was.

And so, with even further and more humble apologies to Chaucer, The Disc Jockey's Constipated Wife's Tale comes to an end thusly:

Whan that the ladie hath unmuck-ed hyer boughwells, Methinks she fowned her marque wyth grounts and growells, That must have byen a nose-some syght to smyell, Whan gush-ed fyorth that fount of poup from Hell.