Every once in a while, someone will ask me what my earliest memory from childhood is. I tell them it’s not really a “memory” but more like a fragment of a memory about looking for my lost plastic toy camera. I tell them I don’t know how old I was at the time, probably around four.
It’s a good answer. But it’s a lie.
My earliest memory isn’t a fragment at all. A more accurate word for it would be an “incident.” I remember the whole thing and all of its details, and I know exactly how old I was at the time. Four years and two weeks old. I could probably pinpoint the actual date of the incident with a little research. But in all these years I’ve never owned up to it because the truth is, well, it’s kind of embarrassing.
My parents were having a Christmas party at our house. All the adults were downstairs talking and laughing, and Dan, Heff and I were all upstairs playing (Spazz wasn’t born yet, but Moop was eight months pregnant at the time). I was cranking away on the jack-in-the-box that Uncle Earl had given me for my birthday, seeing how fast I could make the music play before the monkey popped out.
I had a sudden urge to, uh, relieve myself. I grabbed a comic book, sauntered into the bathroom, closed the door, and took a seat.
Even with the door closed, the voices of the adults were loud. And I started paying attention to what the adults were saying. Or at least I tried to pay attention. They were mostly talking about things that meant nothing to me and people I’d never heard of. Things like “…still can’t get used to saying President Johnson….” But I liked the deep sound of adult voices and the laughter and the clinking of glasses and fancy silverware and the general merriment.
Now this is a bit of a digression, but I have to point out that like all the Boutelle children, I was proud to be “bathroom autonomous” from an early age, which means I didn’t want or need a lot of help. In fact, Moop says I wriggled out of my diaper the same day I learned to crawl, at about six months old—my first act of independence. But there is one particular function with which every small child, even at the relatively advanced age of four, still requires just a little bit of assistance, and that involves, shall we say, an act of personal hygiene after the primary mission is accomplished. And we, the Boutelle children, had received instructions from our parents about how to request such assistance. We were to yell, at the top of our lungs, a very specific phrase, and help would soon arrive.
As I sat there listening to the clanking and chatting and chuckling from down below, I was keenly aware that bellowing the three words that would summon parental assistance could also bring shame and humiliation upon myself. But there didn’t seem to be any option.
So I opened the bathroom door a crack, drew a deep breath, and hollered as loud as I could: “COME AND WIPE!!”
For the briefest moment, the adults were all silent. You could hear a pin drop. Then there was an explosion of laughter. It went on and on. I closed the bathroom door again, beet red. Now do you understand why I have that story about the plastic toy camera?
