My husband (Sherwood Kevin—they called him Sherwood not
Kevin—go figure) and I have racked up a fairly impressive list of most
embarrassing moments over the past thirty plus years of marriage.
There was the
time Sherwood ran out of gas in the drive-through of McDonald’s where he had to
push the car up to the “pick-up” window. Then there was the knee surgery/Sodium
Pentothal fiasco when Sherwood had a little trouble coming “out of it” and told
the Nazis’ (i.e. nurses) in the recovery room that he had four wives and
thirty-seven children and a really HUGE . . . um . . . REASON for all those
wives. Talk about “Big Love.” Then there was the bubble gum on the hairy
buttocks incident—also Sherwood.
He’s racked up a
fairly impressive list of embarrassing moments. But remember I haven’t even
begun to discuss the reams of charming, noxious, embarrassing moments involving
various body fluids erupting in public places from our children during the
“four kids, six and under” years.
The mistake is
to assume that once the children are potty trained and the hubby’s knee rehab
is over, that the humiliation is finally over. You know, the embarrassment of
being alive and breathing in various gases which produce still other gases—when
mixed with, oh say—a Coney Island hotdog. If anything, the relentless march of
age just makes for a lot of fun opportunities to be total bags of gas and
droopy body parts.
Now, “most embarrassing”
is almost a competition, and I’m thinking that I might have taken the lead.
From a recent
phone call confessional:
“Boy, did I have
an embarrassing moment today at work,” my husband began.
Not shocked, I
asked, “Oh good grief now what?”
“Well, I got up
from my desk to greet some co-workers, and when I stood up I just let fly with
a giant . . .”
Cutting him off,
I yelped, “What!?”
“You know.”
“No, what? You
let fly with a groan, a moan, a sigh . . . what?” I paused and embraced the
dawning truth. With slow drip horror, I said, “You. Did. Not!”
“Yep! Right
there in my cubicle.”
“Did anyone say anything?”
“Nope. But their
faces said it all; it was so embarrassing.”
Silence
descended over our conversation like a helium balloon filled with methane.
“Well,” I said,
“I think I’ve got you beat.”
“I don’t know;
that was pretty embarrassing. I’d never met those people before.” Skepticism
mixed with humiliation in his voice.
“I’m telling
you; I’ve got you beat.”
“Okay. Shoot.”
“You know how on
Mondays I clean house in my big old sweatshirt, and I don’t wear . . . you
know, anything . . .”
“Rubber gloves?”
“No! I don’t
wear, you know . . . foundation.” (Foundation is a Southern word for bra. It’s
a cultural thing.)
“And you’re not
talking about makeup.”
“Right.”
“So, I had some
stuff I needed to put in one of those plastic snap Rubbermaid totes, you know
those plastic storage buck-ity things with the lids that I buy by the truckload
from WalMart?”
“Yes.” It was a
worried “yes.”
“Okay, so after
I shoved the junk into the plastic thing and I went to snap the lid closed,” I
said, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, “I snapped the end
of my . . . self in the lid.”
Silence.
“You mean, the
part not wearing foundation,” he said.
“Roger that,” I
sighed. “But the worst part is that the plastic lid was closer to my waist than
my chin when I snapped my . . . self into it.”
“Wow, bummer.
Okay, you win. You now hold the most embarrassing moment prize.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Don’t thank me.
Thank Mother Nature.”
And so it
droops; I mean goes, and so it goes. I’ve never been one to herald “the dignity
of man” much, because I’ve never found any part of living to be very dignified.
Mostly it’s just people pretending that nothing disgusting ever comes out of
their noses or other orifices—ever. But it does, and we all know it. Not only
does disgusting stuff come out of us all the time, sometimes it lingers in the
air and wafts over into the cubicle next to you.
So here’s hoping
that this week finds you downwind and your droopy bits safe from snappy plastic
lids.
Note: If
you find these references too obscure please email me, and I’ll be happy to
tell you that Sherwood farted in front of some clients he had never met, and I
snapped my nipple into a Rubbermaid storage container.
Linda (Flopsy)
Zern
