The Toilet

Yesterday my wife accused me of not knowing how to flush the toilet. I don't mean by that, that she accused me of leaving my waste in the bowl to coagulate like pot of odiferous stew. What I mean is that she accused me of improperly flushing the toilet, as though there was some trick to pushing down on the chrome knob on the side of the toilet that she knew and I did not.

She made this accusation because she heard the toilet running some time after I had flushed it. After giggling the knob to stop the toilet from running she came out into the living room and said, "You have be more careful when you flush the toilet."

I just looked at here. Here was something else she could blame on me.

"And you're just going to ignore me," she said.

I said, "Well, let me ask you this, do you intend to stand like a sentinel at the toilet every time you flush it to make certain it flushes porperly?"

If she was somehow willing to do that I was going to say, 'Have fun, but don't expect me to join you. I know why the toilet runs occasionally, even if you do not."

Instead she said, "That doesn't happen to me." Not that it hadn't happened yet, but that it doesn't happen, as though the Toilet Gods had preordained that all her flushes would be successful.

I looked at her, speechless. I wanted to explain to her how a toilet works, how a rubber stopper in the toilet tank sometimes does not sit properly in the hole that allows water into the toilet bowl, and how it is that imporper sitting that is allowing water to sneak past the stopper into the bowl and thus causing the bowl to run. I wanted to tell her how it is luck, blind, dumb luck, mere chance, happenstance that causes the bowl to flush properly one time and not the next, and that when it fails to flush properly it could happen as easily to her as to me.

But I said nothing. In the overall scheme of things, this was a fairly minor event, and if she derives pleasure, or a sense of accomplishment from knowing how to flush the toilet while I do not, who am I to suggest her day will come.