Several weeks ago, I sat down in our bathroom to conduct some
intestinal business. Upon settling in, I felt a rather sharp pain in my dominant
buttock and quickly dismounted the toilet. What I found was that the wooden
toilet seat had been cracked completely in half. The fissure was almost
consistent enough to have been the result of a power tool.
I immediately set about solving this mystery and I knew just
where to begin. I went to my five-year-old son and casually asked if he recalled
witnessing any structural trauma related to the toilet seat. He got a strange
look on his face and categorically denied all responsibility. This, in and of itself,
was not unusual; what did surprise me is that he did not immediately suggest
his sister as a suspect. He once blamed her for making him fall out of his
chair when she was in a different room, so it was odd that he did not wish to
speculate upon her culpability.
Undeterred, I found my three-year-old daughter playing in her
room and breezily wondered aloud if she knew anything about the broken toilet
seat. Assuming the same look of forced nonchalance displayed by my son, she
denied any knowledge but also declined to incriminate her brother.
While I found my children hurling around baseless accusations
to be annoying, I found their silent collaboration terrifying. Over the next
few days, I went back and forth trying to get one of them to cave with no
success. I suggested plausible scenarios, “Maybe you guys were trying to get something
from the cabinet and it fell….” and even stopped to offering bribes, “there
might be some Sour Patch Kids in it for whoever can help daddy solve the
mystery….”
After a week I had nothing. Out of sheer stubbornness, I left
the seat in place as a reminder that daddy would have his justice. I assumed
that it would keep pinching them just as it did me and eventually someone would
turn state’s evidence. This was a terrible miscalculation on my part since
their tiny little bodies did not separate the halves of the seat enough to
cause discomfort. They barely noticed.
Dejected and unwilling to subject myself to further
discomfort, I went to Lowes one evening to procure a replacement toilet
seat. I was unprepared for how many different colors there were. When I
indicated that it was more of a “tan” color I was given options like “biscuit” “bone”
sandbar” and “dune”. Kohler even has a color called “Thunder Grey” which might
be apropos in some situations we have had in our restroom.
Even narrowing it down to quiet-close hinge models - which
are worth the extra price if you have ever been jolted from slumber by a preschooler
dropping the entire lid apparatus at 3AM – I was left with too many options. I
agonized in the isle for a half-hour trying to take into account environmental
variables like the color temperature of the store’s fluorescent lighting system
before deciding to go with “biscuit.”
By the time I had paid for my purchase, it was pouring rain and
I had forgotten where my car was. After several minutes of running through the
parking lot while brandishing a toilet seat, I located my car and stuffed my
drenched frame into the front seat.
Soaked and already regretting my decision to choose “biscuit”,
I walked into the front bathroom and began the process of swapping out the
toilet seat. Midway through this endeavor my daughter wanders in, glances at
the broken toilet seat now resting on the floor and – without a hint of irony –
asks what happened to the old toilet seat.
If I am fortunate enough to get to Heaven and find myself at
the throne of the Almighty, the toilet seat mystery has now surpassed the JFK assassination as my most pressing supplication.
