People's Restroom Habits

 

"Just a minute, you need to use the papers!"

Had you gone through my mother's white clutch purse in the 70's when I was growing up, you would have found something like this.

A snap case containing EMERGENCY toilet seat covers. I can see the case so clearly in my head and still hear its crinkly contents being unfolded as if it were yesterday.

Not a single butt of any of my mother's six children had EV-ER touched a bare toilet seat.  There was always a film of safety between our behinds.....and what we imagined microscopically lingered on the surface.

Alighting on this germ-laden environment, with no protective layer, we could promise you, would result in the worst case of dogscoot ever.

Durn dogscoot.

On any outing, with six of us in tow, it wouldn't be long before one of us (nine out of ten times, me) would announce, "I have to go to the bathroom!"  and off to the races it was, with my mother digging around in her purse for the bright blue package to hand us, shouting orders in her thick Spanish accent, "Rrrrememberrr tooo pooot down dee paperrrrrs! Dere arrrre sooo manies off dee gerrrrms! Make sure tooo help your leetle seester! Pongan el papel!!"

And so we would place our onion skin papers down, a ritual that had become as natural as setting a table, because we knew she was right.

If, per dreaded chance, there were none of "dee papers," well, then, instructions were clear and never to be broken. No toilet seat was to be sat upon bare nekkid. By ANY one by ANY part of the body.

You were to hover. You were to coat your hands with miles and miles of paper towels and do the hiney-hover.

By age six, I had developed killer triceps that would make any yogi master seethe with jealousy.

Whatever you have to do, do it! Just don't for the love of all that is holy touch that toilet seat!

Even if we'd all be out for a walk, and no one would have the need to relieve themselves, if my mother were to pass a sign--anywhere, gas station, storefront, restaurant--that read "CLEAN RESTROOMS," her eyes would grow wide as if she had just been blessed with a  holy vision and the paper passing would begin. "It's a clean bathroom, we must go! GO! GO!"

A clean bathroom.

I had learned to accept what my memory has filed away as "eccentricities" of my mother.

But I am now that woman. The one that is always in search of the ever elusive clean restroom.

I can't even begin to describe the level of cleanliness that a public restroom must meet,  before I will use it or allow my children to use it.

We will look and search and hunt until the color of our eyes turn yellow to find a clean bathroom before we squat or stand before a filthy toilet.

Forget gas stations.

Pffffffffffft to grungy diner rest stops.

Ain't gonna happen.

The back of an old supermarket? Puh-leez. A-1 best quality untouched by any germ butts here.

I have learned to be a bathroom snob. I can appraise a bathroom in less than  a second, and give it a raised eyebrow, or pursed lip, or sharp gasped evaluation. Based on how many huffs and puffs, or one or two eyebrows up, the children know whether to proceed or not.

We will dance the jig of leprechauns on St. Patrick's Eve and hold it like Beckham before we enter a dirty bathroom.

And Port-A-Potties?

That's when mama counts on her BFF,  StadiumGal.

Wire me up.