Toothbrush

I struggled to find a more clever title for this post, but in the end, I decided just to go basic.

The story, in a nutshell, is that on Thursday, through no fault of his own, Samson ended up watching his toothbrush follow his poo down a flushing toilet. To her credit (and chagrin), Vicki made a valiant effort to stop the toothbrush's fantastic voyage, but alas, to no avail. That night, a friend of ours came over to help me try and locate the errant brush. And by locate, I mean unscrew and lift the toilet off its base.

Of course, you can't just pick a toilet up and put it on its side. I mean, I guess you could. But you probably wouldn't want to.

In any event, our friend, Patrick, helped do all the things needful prior to setting a toilet and tank on its side, and I then attempted to midwife Sam's missing toothbrush. No luck. Vicki gave it a shot. As did Patrick's wife, Noelle. Nothing doing. I suggested, given that his hands are much smaller, that Samson should try, but he seemed to have no interest in sticking his hand up into the toilet bowl.

So, having given it the old college try, we realized there was nothing more to do but hope. It was possible, Patrick said, that the toothbrush had gone all the way through and was even now being picked up at a treatment facility. More likely, however, was that it was stuck somewhere in the serpentine innards of the base of the bowl, never to be seen again. Eventually, he said, it will clog and you'll need to replace the toilet.

Apparently, "eventually" meant "tomorrow." Because I got home on Friday to find the toilet not working. So we had a big old family trip to Home Depot to pick out our new bowl and tank. And a seat with a lid that could only be opened by combination lock.

On Friday night, Vicki and I got to work removing our old toilet (again) and installing the new one. Had we not just seen the whole thing done the night before, we'd probably still be up there working on it. But we managed to do the entire job ourselves. Which --- laugh if you want --- felt pretty good. Especially as I'm sure a plumber would have charged us a good bit for the work involved.

On Saturday morning, Samson and I made a trip to the dump. I didn't want to have an old toilet sitting by our garbage pails for any longer than absolutely necessary, and (more the point) I was pretty excited to hurl this thing to its doom and watch it shatter. Sort of like the old Letterman stunts from way back in the early days.

So there Sam and I stood, the back of the minivan pulled up to the lip of the dump's, er, dumping area. It was already hot and fairly smelly at the dump, but this felt like an event --- like something significant Samson and I were sharing. Not necessarily on the order of Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah, but a moment nonetheless.

And lo, did I lift the old toilet up. And yea did I hurl it into the depths to watch it smash a hundredfold. And it smashed with the roar of a thousand toilets.

"Look," cried out young Samson. "There's my toothbrush."

And so it was. And it was good. [Actually, it was gross. It was twisted with enough toilet paper to qualify as a Christo installation. Also, there was poo.]