A Little Late This Morning

Excuse me if am brief and incoherent.  For the last couple of days I have been engaged in collecting stool samples which requires of me a certain psychic disposition for which I must prepare myself.  I have behind me rich memories of dealing with shit.  My wife and I at a certain desperate point in our early married life had three youngsters in diapers simultaneously.  This was in the good old days when diapers were cloth, and were washed to use again, from which the shit--or 'kaka,' as I think we said in front of the tots--had to be dropped out or scraped out depending on the consistency before the diaper was deposited in the pail from which as the days rolled by evil smells arose.  So now, taking the tiny weeny shovel attached to the cap of each vial supplied for fecal analysis and poking about in the material my intestines have offered up each morning allows one a certain distance based on those accumulated memories.  More recently when I was in my fifties I was a volunteer ward aide at Cambridge City Hospital where I had the pleasure of revisiting human excreta, as we say in politer circles.  Many of the patients whom I was charged with cleaning up for another day lying or sitting blankly staring at the wall--they being the more advanced daffy ones--had, I was to discover, filled their diapers during the night.  Thank God, we had moved on to disposables.  I am sure parents nowadays scarcely notice, so quickly can they remove the plastic with its treasure load, toss it all away, and move on to cleaning up the tot.  Today before I began this filling of the vials I was out in the yard digging in the earth, oh, all so symbolic, similar colors, and so on and so forth, planting petunias in a large empty bed where in years past stood tomato plants.  We hope to be gone before the tomato season, but realized that the prospective buyers touring the grounds would not be taken with the vigor of the weeds growing in the patch.  So petunias it is.  Onward and upward on another lovely sunny morning down by the seashore!