Eggs:
 
I can pretty much only eat them hard boiled, and even then, I very rarely do.  Fried eggs are completely repellent to me.  When I was a kid, my mom used to occasionally put cheese in scrambled eggs, which I found disgusting then and still do now.  Consequently, I didn't eat scrambled eggs for something like twenty years, except tiny pieces in fried rice, which I didn't care about.  When I started a job where they served breakfast every morning, I remembered that I did kind of like scrambled eggs – but with lots of ketchup, and on toast.  I tried them again that way, and indeed they were delicious.  I started having them a few times a week, whenever the cook would make them.  Then one day for no real reason I stopped eating them, didn't miss them at all, and have no desire to eat them again. 

There is a moment in a recent movie where, the morning after an exhausting night spent orchestrating an elaborate, multi-course meal for an important customer, one of the characters (a chef) offhandedly whips up scrambled eggs for his brother in the kitchen of their restaurant.  Watching that scene made me want to give scrambled eggs another chance, but I suspect I was more impressed with the effortless way the character prepared the eggs than I was with the idea of actually eating them.

Potty Training:
 
I don't remember potty training ever being a problem for me as a child.  Or for any of my brothers, either.  That said, I do remember my brother not wanting to go downstairs to the bathroom one morning, so instead he got out of bed and peed all over his drawing pad.  I remember that vividly.
 
When my brothers and I were in the Boy Scouts, we would spend winters camping in bare-bones, unheated cabins.  It would get cold.  And even worse than the cold, it was often scary.  It was the woods, for Christ’s sake!  The "willie" (outhouse) was a good distance from the cabin (maybe a hundred yards? probably less), and I remember one trip waking up in the middle of the night and thinking it was so cold and so scary, there was no way I was making that trek.  So I just stepped outside and peed from the stairs onto the dirt.  The next morning, I was one of the last out of bed while everyone was crowded in the doorway laughing.  I joined them to find my puddle of pee had frozen over in the night.  I’m not sure that there’s a moral to the story, unless it’s never underestimate the amusement value of frozen pee to a group of young boys.
 
The Harris family moved to my town around 5th or 6th grade.  Paul was in my class and Charles was in my older brother's.  Paul was a really nice kid with red hair and freckles, while Charles was kind of an arrogant wuss with black hair and freckles.  Much later, in high school, Paul got Tina Epps (also a pretty nice person) pregnant, and I think they may have got married.  As I recall, Charles died tragically either right before this or not long after (I think after); the word was, he was bulimic and had choked on his own vomit in a binge-and-purge when no one was home.

I don't know what their father did, but the parents had money for sure.  Maybe not the kind of money I think of now when I say things like that, but they were well-off.  They were a little older than most of the parents of kids I knew, but again, looking back, not by too much.  It’s funny how experience eventually closes gaps that seem so vast when you’re twelve. 

They were very friendly people, the parents.  Mr. Harris, in particular, was the walking definition of "affable".  He was a “can-do” kind of fellow, and the very much the type of person who would use the terms “can-do” and “fellow”.  The family was also active in Scouting, and when we’d go on weekend trips, the Harris boys brought all kinds of high-tech camping "gadgets" – exactly the kinds of thing my more traditional father (also the scoutmaster) frowned on.  He always told the kids in the troop not to bring things like radios or headphones or video games, and when they did anyway, he would confiscate them, locking the contraband in the car, far from the campsite.  I remember thinking all those little widgets of theirs made them seem “soft” to me, as if they weren’t man enough for “real” camping.  At the same time, I would have been pleased to own any of those “outdoorsman toys” myself, and I’m certain I wouldn’t have thought any less of myself for having them.
 
Looking back, I guess I harbored a secret contempt for the Harris family, though I had no reason to.  Charles could be was kind of a spoiled jerk, but he was totally harmless, and for time, Paul was one of my best friends – at an age when the whole concept of a “best friend” was especially significant.  What’s more, the family was always very kind and welcoming to me.
 
One cabin trip, Mr. Harris brought along a small portable toilet.  Everyone made jokes about it, and he took the ribbing with typical good humor.  He told everyone we were still welcome to use it if we needed to in the night.  I think he might have been on "firewatch" (where you take turns staying up to keep the fire going) when I woke up and had to pee - though it's more likely he wasn’t on firewatch, and I just woke him up because it was freezing cold outside.  He said I could use the new toilet, that it was not a problem.
 
Basically, it looked like a tiny toilet seat with wire legs; the whole thing was about the diameter of an emergency donut tire, as I recall.  He set it up in a side room - indoors, but around the back of the cabin, where we stacked the firewood.  He took out a special black plastic bag with a drawstring, maybe about the size of a large freezer bag, and wrapped it around the rim.  Then he left me alone to handle my business.  And he probably phrased it just that way, too.
 
I remember watching the bag begin to sag more and more the more I peed, and I was sure I was either going to overflow it or, more likely, the bag would just get too heavy, slip free of the ring, and splash all over the floor - and me.
 
But it didn't.  It was fine.  When I finished, I told Mr. Harris and he came in and pulled the big bag of pee out by the drawstring.  Then he took it outside to pour it out, or maybe to toss the bag; I don't remember which.  But then that's exactly the kind of thing you had to expect from camping gadgets like that, I must have thought as I climbed back into my bunk; sure you could pee inside with it, but then you either have to keep a big bag of pee in your cabin all night or go outside to dump it anyway.

copyright,  © 2006 Wyatt Doyle

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