A Full Moon

Even though I have had a decidedly adolescent sense of humor since about the age of five, I still have just plain missed many of the opportunities for immaturity that fate has provided me. Returning back to my parents' home for a visit, I have discovered one of these lost opportunities. As long as I can remember, my parents have had the toilet paper roll on the paper dispenser in the bathroom, and they kept a spare roll underneath a crocheted dolly on top of the toilet. If you put the paper roll under the doll figure, her dress becomes a hoop skirt, and she looks like a beautiful girl who is going to her first ball. I have always taken for granted that, if you look on top of the toilet, you will see a boring sight: a perfectly nice toilet paper roll made to look all pretty and girly. Charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting, since it's what's on the inside that really matters.

Well, imagine my surprise when I went into the bathroom yesterday, expecting to see the boring old hoop skirt girl, only to discover that she was now mooning me! There, in all of its unflattering glory, was a prominently raised tush. Since there was no one else in the room, it hardly seemed probable that she had intended to moon someone else.

I suppose, in retrospect, it cannot be said that she was actually "mooning" me. It was a bathroom, after all, and that's the kind of thing you see when you open a bathroom door without knocking. It was also nice to see the doll demonstrating the very activity she was there to help me out with--kind of like an airline stewardess, only, for the bathroom. I can't help thinking that if the author and stylist Henry James had visited this bathroom, he would have been charmed by the doll's preference for "showing" the action rather than "telling" the action. Indeed, this new doll position clearly fulfilled the modernist artistic ideal of form fitting function in a way that the hoop-skirt never could have. You could also see the entire bathroom incident as a surprizing manifestation of the "poetic justice" you usually only observe in stories: like the robber who has been robbed by his intended victim, or the schemer trapped in his own designs, I was the one being mooned by the very person I had mooned many times before.

Anyway, I discovered upon exiting the bathroom, as I was stumbling around and giggling uncontrollaby, that my wife "accidentally" left the figurine in this provocative pose when she had taken out the spare toilet paper roll. Accidental---or providential? It's exciting how many chance beauties we might miss if we're not looking and our back is turned--or someone else has turned hers.