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Musings in a Toilet Room
Elena Tilli
A Note from the Author: nature of hosing down four little girls, not to
This was written in response to Tanizaki's In Praise ~ention t~eir assorted Barbie dolls and My
LIttle Pomes, along with the other hundred
of Shadows, an essay commenting on the differences various and sundry playthings, all swept
between the Japanese reverence for the toilet and the along with these said daughters for their daily
Western avoidance of all that is scatological. bath. My father was made to perform the
As I look out over Westminster, with its loathsome task of scrubbing his daughters
~ights twinkling in the distance, I can almost clean, combating their full day spent in the
Ignore the insistent and incessant din made Kingdom of the Great Backyard, playing with
by ~heimmature residents across the parking M'lord Mud, the Empress of Sand, and a
lot In a building called Rouzer. From my seat Green Giant by the name of Grass.
on the toilet, I can see the determined red flick-
ering light of the radio tower out in the near He loathed this task above all others a fa-
distance, a calming beacon for all those who ther is required to do, but since he had to do
gaze upon its intermittent twinkle. I can al- it, he, being the joker that he was, decided to
most forget the busy running bodies of the rat have fun whilst performing the ancient child
race below, those poor rats, who don't have bathing ritual. And so, being an intelligent
the time to sit on a toilet and think about the man, he preyed upon the thing above all
meaning of life, or even to reflect upon by- things revered and desired by all normal chil-
gone years and digest their significance. I can dren. He used his daughter's love of ICE
almost ignore all the bothersome reminders CREAM to bring about his permanent ban-
of the present and be transported to a place ishment from the holy Bathroom and the
that has not this sense of rush and urgency: a eradication of his reign as the Daughter Bather
King. My father began going through the
place where time and space have no
meaning, a place where the toilet is every-
~hing. The toilet is peace and harmony The toilet is peace and
In this chaotic and modernized society. harmony in this chaotic and
The toilet is the only place where I can
be freed of all of my frustrations and modernized society.
worries of this world. This room, the
holy Bathroom, is my sanctuary, in
which I can let go of the present and pon-
der the past, a simpler and happier time. motions of washing his daughters' hair by
I am transported back to the childhood im- making a good thick lather, working and re-
working the shampoo into their scalps. He
age of my father, the only man in a house full then took the multitude of excess shampoo
of girls--a kind and funny man who was al- froth and told his daughters a big, fat lie! He
ways attempting to get out of giving his four told his daughters that this froth was special
daughters their baths. Each Saturday night, froth that magically turned into ICE CREAM!
he was asked, not too unkindly, by my poor Those simple words brought on boisterous de-
mother to scrape, scour, cleanse, rinse, and dry mands for him to produce this miraculous
each of their daughters, since he was not transformation, which he was only too glad
present for bathing time at the zoo during the
week. I say zoo only to indicate the chaotic
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