October 23: Hidden Treasures

People are rarely willing to reveal their most embarrassing moments of growing up. Why would we want to relive and recreate the times we wish never happened in the first place? A girl falls face first in the mud in front of her crush. A boy gets kicked in the crotch by a bully at school. These are the moments that shape who we are, but they are not the moments we want to experience again and again. It is for this very reason that I have no qualms about sharing the following story.

I must have been twelve-years-old. He must have been thirteen. It was a Friday night and I had been looking forward to it since I received my parents' permission the previous week to have a friend stay over. We would explore the brushes and creeks of the canyon behind my house. We would get Little Caesar's pizza for dinner and play Mario until my mom came in and told us to go to bed. The next day, we would eat waffles for breakfast and play HORSE until it was time to say goodbye. It was sure to be a fantastic visit.

Everything played out just as planned. We did some exploring. We had some pizza. We plopped ourselves down in front of the television set and I unwound two controllers, blew out the Mario All Stars cartridge, and powered up the Super Nintendo system. We worked together as we tried to unlock new levels of Mario 2 before my mom came in and told us to start taking showers. I would go first and he would keep playing and then we would switch.

When you have a friend stay the night, it's important to cover his or her tracks throughout the stay. Your parents may have rules that the visitor might not know about and as a resident of the premises, it is your responsibility to pick up after the guest. These little "chores" might include removing a wet towel from the hamper and hanging it on a designated rack or turning any lights off that aren't being used. When my friend returned from his shower, I went to the bathroom to tidy up.

For the most part, my friend did a nice job cleaning up after himself. He remembered to hang his towel up and the lights were all turned off. He did, however, forget to hang the bath rug over the edge of the tub, but it was a forgivable offense seeing as how I took my shower first and he didn't know any better. What wasn't forgivable, though, was what I found beneath the bath rug.

When I bent down to grab the rug, I expected to see white tile, but to my absolute horror, my eyes fell on two three-inch brown, soft and lumpy logs. Frozen in disbelief, I stared at the fecal matter while the sounds of a tiny plumber jumping over pipes and stomping on turtle shells played somewhere in the distance. A plumber. Pipes. How ironic! I couldn't believe what I was looking at. How did this happen? How could a thirteen-year-old person miss a toilet by that much and then cover it up with a rug?

After scratching my head in confusion for what seemed to be hours, I told my mom what I had discovered and she did the dirty work for me. Of course by dirty work, I don't mean the clean-up. She's the one that approached my "friend" on the subject. She's the one that told my "friend" to stop playing Mario and to get into the bathroom. She's the one that told my "friend" to get down on his hands and knees and scrub my bathroom floor with disinfectant.

Because of the events of the evening, I don't remember much else about the visit. I can't remember how much longer we played video games or how late we stayed up. I can't remember what we had for breakfast or if we even played HORSE the next day. I just know he was never invited back to my house.

I haven't been keeping tabs on him, but if I were I betting man, I think it would be safe to say that was his most embarrassing moment. Who knows, though. A kid dumb enough to cover his own excrement with someone else's bath rug is bound to have a few moments of shame. I don't think he went around sharing the memory with anyone else, but I figured this was the best venue for me to.