Playboy. The eternal magazine of my youth where I could appreciate it for the articles and not the well endowed women who seemed to be forgetting to get dressed. How this tomb to the female figure influenced my parenting of 2 girls is not the topic of this discussion, although it will certainly be written about. No, Playboy embodies all things that it meant to be my father. Not so much for the content of such. That, as I have said will be written about. More about where he learned what rum could do for him and how Old Spice made him feel more like a man… although he smelled like a sailor.
Anyway, I grew up thinking my father had had a dysfunctional bowel that caused him to sit upon the toilet for hours on end. In my family, when another was in the bathroom, you did not enter. You merely waited, or went and used the sink in the kitchen. We were a house full of boys and what my mother did not know was better that way. Regardless, it took me almost 3 years of being a father before I realized what was occurring when my father would have these epic defecation episodes.
He wasn't endlessly defecating into the Stow Ohio municipal sewer system while turning a bright red as his brain pleaded for air but his anus pleaded for pressure. No, this was not a time to use reams of toilet paper like the millions of green barred dot matrix computer paper he used to print out his first program he ever wrote. No, he, my father, was actually reading. I'd put reading in quotes since it was Playboy, but still he was spending his time contemplating what the Playboy Advisory was telling him while trapped in his only place a married man in his thirties with 2 children could be safe… and… (gasp)… alone!
Unknowingly, I had unraveled the secrets of my elders. After a certain loud day when Xoe and Sage were trying to determine who could be louder and less logical, I found myself rushing up stairs to relieve my bowel of its contents when it dawned on my I should have brought something to read. Ahh, linear notes to the new Opeth CD I had just purchased.
Then it happened. There, upon the porcelain thrown that so many had come to worship after nights of debauchery, I sat and read. Hmm, drowning in the sea… interesting. I had thought it was drawing Aunt Bea… In a frenzy, my mind had a moment of cosmic clarity which I determined was strange given my present situation. I was married, with two little girls who rarely left me alone long enough to listen to music let alone learn that a song is about killing someone and not the Andy Griffith Show. I had unfurrelled the secret. Another page in the How to survive being a dad handbook was deciphered.
But what to do with this knowledge? To speak the madness of my finding to my wife or children would surely bring down the walls of my seclusions. The only liner notes I would be reading would be those in a Barney sing-a-long book. My only option was eat more beans. I was sure they would discover my secret; I had to tell them to confirm my sanity. But beans, or other foods which would cause odor, would surely allow my solitude to continue regardless of their knowledge of my discovery.
And so, I sit on a toilet and read. Each day, I have as much time I need to read. I know novels are still a distance dream, but a song here, a list of thank yous there; I can learn music again. I know more words than the few words I can glean from my 15 minute drive to work. I know Aunt Bea is not drowning in the sea. But my processes bean meal may be.
