the family [1]. Talking about pooping and poop itself were never verboten with Pops.
Born on a working plantation in South Mississippi in the early 20th Century, Pops and his many brothers and sisters grew up using two-seater, privacy-free outhouses during the arduous days, and chamber pots for peeing during the long nights. Indoor plumbing only became a reality for him in the '40's, in his farmhouse which we grandchildren would later visit for Sunday dinners and summer weekends.
On one such visit, my cousin William and myself were digesting our dinners and relaxing with Pops in his parlor, after spending most of the day boat fishing with him on one of his many well-stocked ponds.
"Pops, does the food you eat get into your bloodstream?" William asked him out of the blue.
"Gets in your bloodstream, in the toilet stream, everywhere," Pops answered with a wry grin, followed by a healthy nip of Old Crow on the rocks, his libation of choice. He also could whip up a mean Mint Julep that would flat put you to sleep.
Pops frequently hosted all of us male grandchildren on deer hunts, a plantation tradition he never outgrew. We were expected to get up at three in the morning, drive down to his 354-acre spread, climb up into the deer stands in the freezing cold, fight off the mosquitoes and wait for something to show up. And while you really haven't lived until you've seen a deer gutted and watched that river of greenish liqui-shit squirt out of its miles of intestines, more often than not we didn't see anything out there in the woods, much less kill something. What we did end up doing, though, was squatting out in the bushes and pinching off hot, steaming piles in the bleary-eyed, yawning dawn -- something Pops encouraged us to do, rather than hold it in until we got back to the house.
There was, in fact, only one bathroom in his farmhouse. I spent two weeks one summer with Pops, and I remember his casual attitude towards its use. It was exactly the same as my immediate family's attitude towards using the bathroom the four of us shared shamelessly. Pops would help me draw the water to take my evening bath in the old clawfoot tub, and it wasn't unusual for me to be scrubbing up my bits and pieces with a washcloth while he was downloading on the toilet across the way. Once, I walked in on him on the pot and said, "Oh, I didn't know you were in here." With his usual witty economy, he replied: "Well, now you know."
All of his children and grandchildren took their cue from Pops, shamelessly using the sparse facilities to the extent that when the lot of us were given "wash up for dinner" orders one Sunday by Lee, my grandfather's wonderful long-time cook and housekeeper, one of my female cousins, Janie, just sat down on the toilet to download right in front of all of us gathered at the sink soaping up. Her mother, one of my favorite aunts, stood beside her -- perhaps for a little moral support -- and smiled at us with typical family moxie. "Well, it's the only bathroom in the house, and she had to go." Of such stock is my shameless ass made.
So when I finally got home from my travels and dropped by to visit and console my mother, she gave me the whole story of Pops' final toilet travails. He had developed a heart condition in his later years (he was pushing 80 when he died), and had evidently been straining when his time came. His devoted Lee had supplied the family with the rest of the details.
Pops had evidently called her into the bathroom at the first sign of his unusual trouble -- not only of passing his stool completely, but of maintaining a regular heartbeat. Lee claimed his exact words to her when she entered the room were: "I got a hard one that won't come out all the way, Lee." Then, apparently, he gave an odd little hiccup of sorts, made a painful face and presciently said to her, sitting there on the pot in all his glory, and in a manner that still gives me chills, "Kiss me on the forehead, now. And don't be afraid when I'm gone. I want you to call Mr. Buddy" -- Pops' only son -- "and he'll know what to do from there. Now, come on, kiss me goodbye."
She did so, and then he slumped and was gone. The task of flushing what he had managed to leave behind fell to Lee as well, after the paramedics arrived and took him away.
The next time I got together with my cousins, several months after Pops' funeral, we laughed and laughed over good food and drink -- as he would have wanted us to do -- about the fact that he had died on the pot. Shameless to the end and just his style, we all concurred.
Pops would be proud to know that some of his progeny, particularly yours truly, have continued in the grand and glorious wide-open toilet tradition; and I believe he would have loved reading PoopReport with that earthy, Old Crow-nipping, dirty joke-cracking passion that was always his.
I think I'd like to follow his Shameless example one day and die on the pot myself.
-- The Big Wiper [2]
