We were traveling back from our family vacation. Shortly after getting on the road, Cody mentioned he had to go to the bathroom. It is always alarming to hear these words from a child, as you can never truly know the severity of urgency. I took the first exit off of the interstate that seemed safe and clean enough for Cody. He’s quite particular when it comes to public restrooms, and absolutely everything else. Not unlike all other 8 year old boys with or without A.D.H.D.

We hurriedly entered the truck-stop and found the restroom. Of course, it was requested that I clean off the toilet, so like a tentative and caring father, I did. I explained the importance of wiping down the front of the throne, where your pants touch, because usually, it has been dribbled with someone else’s urine. I think my actual words were,”Don’t forget to clean this part”, while smiling, to ease the harshness of the lesson. If I had mentioned urine, he would have completely lost his mind.

So I patiently waited outside the stall, noticing things like a lone, dirty, toilet scrubber on the floor, halfway under the sink. An odd place for that to be. There’s a story we will never know about that scrubber. And there were framed posters for sale at the entrance to the restrooms, where the foyer splits the genders using hieroglyphic stick figures as the common language of our people. A triangle at the waist specifies the female of our species, whereas, no triangle is the male. The posters on the female portal side, are of manly, shirtless men, holding manly tools, and pouting. To the left, images of curvy women, in highly precarious poses wearing non-sensible high heels, and also pouting. One poster had the 50’s model, Bettie Page covered in tasteless tattoo’s, poorly photo-shopped, giving the appearance of lick-and-stick temporary tattoos from a quarter machine in a dimly lit and carpet stained corner of a deeply urban grocery store. And of course, there was the poster that unites all humankind with commonality. Any image of Marilyn Monroe. Everybody likes Marilyn Monroe.
As I paced through the florescent light reflections in the water droplets on the bleached white tile floor, I heard the toilet flushing repeatedly and saw his moving shadow through the crack in the door, I asked Cody, “is everything all right in there?” He hesitated while he organized his explanation, as he usually does, and started to answer- just as I interrupted,”If you wiggle around on the seat, the light sensor thinks you’ve left, and the toilet automatically flushes. You gotta stay still on there, you can’t move around”. He got really quiet, which is way better than arguing with me, or getting his feelings hurt. I felt a glowing sense of pride that I actually explained something, he listened, he understood, and he calmly remedied the problem. It is far more likely that his lack of response was due to being momentarily paralyzed by the enormous turd escaping his tiny body.

After I overheard Cody do the toilet paper clean up work and flush, I heard a sigh of frustration and another flush. And another. He opened the stall door and briefly looked at me with a mix of confusion, frustration, and shyness. He looked at the floor and tried to explain, “It won’t go into the hole. It’s across and won’t go down the hole.” In my years of traveling, even as a truck driver, I have seen strange and horrible things in public bathrooms, but I have never seen this before. His giant poo was laying across the bottom of the toilet bowl, like it was standing up, at one point, and someone pushed it over in front of them. It was a single, 9 1/2 inch, solid limb that was lodged in a way that could not physically be flushed down the toilet. Like a log over a creek.  A terrible physics experiment, an unsightly sight to behold, an anomaly of nature. It was shocking, then hilarious. I couldn’t help but smile, and say, “That is impressive, Cody. You may have a gift”. Cody was slowly finding humor in the situation as his genuine concern, confusion, and overall stress faded. He smiled and coyly said,”I don’t know why it’s so funny – because it’s disgusting, but it is”. I replied, in that glorious moment, “Welcome to boyhood, son. It only gets better from here”.

We stood there for a moment as I tried to devise a plan that would sink the colossal fecal obstruction. I considered using the dirty toilet scrubber on the floor to prod it into submission, but decided that it would be too gross. Then someone entered the restroom and unknowingly added chaos to our situation. I did not want to explain to a stranger why my son and I were just hanging out in a bathroom discussing the physical properties of poop, so I chose to calmly walk away instead. I probably missed an opportunity for a fatherly lesson in cleaning up after yourself and not being a disgusting and rude person, but in the awe and confusion of this situation, I felt it best to leave it to the professionals. The truck-stop janitorial staff.

There is a possibility that it may have been discovered by a tired and ragged truck driver that had an extremely uneventful day, and this might’ve lifted his spirits and enabled a renewed zest for life. It might’ve been photographed and cataloged and gone viral on the internet. It could’ve raised this particular truck-stop from financial turmoil as a tourist designated “New wonder of the world”. Or the stool may have just surrendered to the the will of gravity and eventually fell in. You never know what might have happened.

His poop was left in the hands of fate.