NUMBER TWO musings
By Wendell A. Duffield
Inspired by the vision of neighborhood landscapes festooned with the white ribbons of trickster-tossed rolls of toilet paper … especially around Halloween
An essay about the ins and outs of human feces and the business of dealing with them may be tough to market, but I’m writing it anyway. Any loss of a lavish advance and follow-up royalties be damned! The idea of stirring my knowledge of things pooo into the published public cesspool of literature has scented the recesses of my thoughts for way too many years to delay my yearning for action any longer. Besides, at sixty-seven-years-old and counting, I may soon descend into the Palin pit of a hopelessly scrambled English language. The time for action is now, while I can still produce a grammatically correct sequence of subject-verb-object, adorned with properly interspersed phrases and modifiers, all of which is terminated with a period, question mark, or exclamation point.
As a PhD scientist (the certificated proof of which is called pooo paper by jealous detractors), part of the structure for any successful essay calls for definition of key terms up front. Now, pooo may not strike you as something remotely associated with the phrase “up front”, but let me clarify terminology before delving into some scatological history and sociological aspects attached to this word.
My copy of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary doesn’t list pooo. But aren’t Google searches wonderfully informative! With apologies to sensitive readers (and to the popular homophonous Winnie), the Urban Dictionary’s definition is the noun used to describe the amount of sh*t that is passed in any single bowel movement. An additional o (or two or more) describes an increased volume per event. Just imagine the elephantine size of a pile of pooooooo! In my lexicon, pooo is also a verb. It is also known as number two.
Was it unique to rural grade-schools in Minnesota? Or did you, too, have to ask to visit the loo by raising your hand with an index finger and its long neighbor extended for permission to go pooo? A lone index finger requested tinkle time. Teacher would nod her okay. Lake Wobegon etiquette demanded that no words be spoken.
New students learned this digital signing system from their veteran schoolmates. Where the first-ever students learned the code was the stuff of murky lore. Teachers never volunteered an explanation of who invented (and why) number two for pooo. Neither did my parents. But my gentle, wise and understanding maternal Grandmother did.
As a child, I spent tons of time at Grandma and Grandpa’s farm. Watching the uninhibited barnyard antics of their chickens, cows, dogs, ducks, horses, pigs and sheep inevitably created a lot of questions about animal behavior in the mind of a young naïve boy. Grandma always encouraged me to ask about whatever was on my mind. So she wasn’t a bit surprised when I asked why pairs of these critters liked to ride each other, or when I popped the question of why pooo was known as number two at school.
I blurted forth my pooo enquiry while Grandma and I were sitting on the entry stoop of their small clapboard home. She stopped washing chicken pooo from the day’s freshly gathered eggs, dried her hands on her ankle-length tent-cut dress, sat me on her knee, and began. “So, Wendy,” she said in a soothing voice where condescension never roamed. “Today you want to know why pooo at your school is number two.” She tousled my hair as she spoke. “For an eight year old, you’re growing up pretty fast. Seems you want to know all the whys behind the way people and other animals behave.” During some of my earlier visits we’d already covered the basics of farm-animal breeding and birthing, with hints of how humans fit into that overall rodeo of bareback rides.
I nodded and grinned, exposing a missing front tooth whose recent loss had been rewarded by the so-called midnight fairy. With this tooth, though, I learned the un-fairyed version of how coins came to be placed under my pillow as I slept. Dad had mistakenly included his favorite steam-locomotive flattened penny in the loot. Santa Claus was still real to me, but now I hoped to learn the truth behind yet another of the many growing-up mysteries.
“Yes Grandma,” I said snuggling deeper into her lap.
She didn’t have to urge me to pay attention, like my school teacher often did. Grandma’s stories were always fascinating. As I looked up into her face, she summoned her special wizened twinkle of sky-blue eyes, and pointed to the old white two-holer, a tired-looking building that sat well away from the house in the prevailing down-wind direction. My eyes followed her finger.
“When you go to that outhouse,” she began. “When you drop your bib overalls to the floor, then your undies, and sit over an opening to take care of business, what’s the first thing out?”
Grandma and Grandpa didn’t have indoor plumbing for a flush toilet. They also didn’t have electricity or a pressurized water system. Kerosene lamps lit the house at night, and human effort at the handle of a well’s pump lifted groundwater to the surface for human and farm-animal consumption alike. On many days, a harnessed Great Plains wind helped lift water, too.
I closed my eyes and puzzled silently, trying to recreate the sequence of events in Stormy, the name Grandpa had painted across the door of the single-purpose shed. I’d never before thought about the order of body-waste expulsion on the many occasions of occupying Stormy’s throne. What kind of mind would be doing that? Besides, my keen sense of smell always said do your business fast and flee this stinky place. I gritted my teeth to help with concentration.
Let’s see. Sit, relax, and …….. Aha! “I’ve got it Grandma,” I yelled, eyes open wide. “Number one always starts first. Always. So number two has to be pooo!!”
“That’s right,” Grandma said, as she lifted me to my feet and went back to washing eggs so they wouldn’t be rejected by the commercial buyer in town. “You’re a smart boy Wendy. I bet you’ll be a teacher some day. Now, run down to the barn and tell Grandpa that it’s time for lunch.”
I can’t wait to tell my classmates, I thought, flashing my gap-toothed open-mouth smile at Grandma, before sprinting toward the big red building.
Back to the present-day thoughts: Early Homo sapiens were presumably about as self conscious and socially concerned as my pet dog when Nature called for number-two action. Squat, squeeze off the last tapered sausage-like link, and walk away relieved. Having witnessed my dog’s occasional misstep, one should never back away from a fresh pooo pile.
As time passed, increasingly fastidious Homo sapiens introduced the technique of a post-pooo wipe. The advantages of this practice had become obvious to many of the human senses and sensibilities. Though rarely appearing in public print, treatises of wipeology make for educational reading, and as you will soon discover, may even correlate with the strength of an economy.
Now … please look beyond the broad range of toilet paper shapes, thicknesses, absorbency coefficients, and so forth that exist in different cultures. Instead, consider characteristics of the two primary folding practices applied to a typical roll of perforated American stock. There are two fundamentally different techniques. Adherents of camp A neatly fold a few sheets along the lines of perforation to create a multi-ply tool for the job. Folks of camp B, however, are risk-taking wadders. They tear off a random length of the paper and scrunch it into a mass that fits the hand at hand. The personality contrasts between adherents of A and B carry fundamental Freudian behavioral connotations whose discovery I leave to the reader.
The true sophisticates of folders are keenly aware of a substantial strength-anisotropy factor that can determine the number of sheets needed for a clean-hand wipe. Some brands of paper are much stronger across, than along sheets … a bit like the popular string cheese that tears so easily in one direction. So, if a folder wants to minimize the possibility of dirty digits because he or she held a multi-ply tool in the weak orientation, appropriate pre-wipe problem-solving and follow-on action are essential. Thus, with some thought a forehand, the digits of a folder can stay clean and even reduce the pooo-time carbon footprint by using fewer (properly-oriented) sheets per successful operation. Wadders cancel out the anisotropy factor, because their individual sheets are arranged in random orientations during the wadding process.
A third technique of paper usage exists, although to date only a few practitioners of this style are publicly known. A roller wraps the paper around and around and around the hand until it is swaddled as completely and tightly as an Egyptian mummy. This is clearly wasteful of paper, but a clean-hand wipe is guaranteed for even the most spastic of poooers.
Yet another variation of paper usage speaks directly to prevalent supply-and-demand conditions within a society. Your attention please! For three adult years, I lived in Hawaii, where most of life’s necessities arrive by ship. Island longshoremen know that being able to control the flow of these goods is a powerful bargaining tool. Ergo, strikes are frequent. During one protracted work stoppage, I learned that the human capacity for hording and thieving is not far below the surface veneer of an otherwise civilized society. Once such staples as salt, pepper, rice, soy sauce … and yes even toilet paper … were in increasingly short supply, they began to disappear from restaurants and other non-traditional shopping centers. The dirty truth was that some islanders dined out for the sole purpose of pilfering. Silverware was not at all coveted the way butt wipe was!
My friend Jeff, who had lived in Hawaii his entire life, laughed when I expressed surprise about this troubling aberrant human behavior. “Happens with every long strike,” he said. “At first, when supplies are getting kind of tight, folks don’t spice their food as much. Maybe they eat less rice per serving. The popularity of our locally-produced tasteless pasty poi sometimes makes a comeback. Fruit on wild trees doesn’t go to waste. That kind of thing. People make do. As we locals say, It’s no big thing.”
“Common sense,” I said.
“But here is a big thing that you may not believe because you haven’t lived here long enough to be pushed to this extreme. Folks eventually make their toilet paper do double duty.”
“What do you mean by double?”
“Use a little imagination,” Jeff said. “Another local saying is that You know the Island economy is really in the toilet when you have to use both sides of the paper.”
I’ve since tried the two-sided folder technique with varying degrees of success. One-handed manual dexterity is a huge plus. The less-than-kind side of my political leanings smiles at the thought of somehow forcing less-than-honorable elected office holders to use the two-sided technique for the rest of their lives.
Pooo power to the people!!! |
