Where To Freshen Up

I was in Harvard Square yesterday morning drinking a coffee at Au Bon Pain and waiting until it was time to meet a friend for lunch.  It came to me that I wanted to use a toilet, and thought to myself I could go down the street to Widener Library or I could go to the Coop.  Of course the place where I was had a facility as well, but I remembered it from years ago as small and smelly, and something you had to fight your way to through a sea of tables, maybe even flag down an attendant with a key.  No, it was not that urgent.  There was a quasi public toilet in the Holyoke Center, quasi in the sense that it was private in that you had to walk through something like a subway stile (is that how you spell it?), and yet right there on the ground level and the guards seemed to let people through in a random fashion, and yet, you had a very definite feeling that if someone who looked like a homeless person would not get through. I have always said that the years of pain and humiliation going to Harvard Graduate School were worth it to be able to use Widener, and that is still true, but now more for the polished gleaming and very clean large mens room than the endless rows of book stacks.  I can remember when I bought a family membership to MoMA so there would be a clean place to take the children, not to mention myself in midtown Manhattan.  But that was before I discovered the excellent attended toilet on the sixth floor of Saks.  Having been the director of a graduate classics program consortium made up of Fordham, CUNY, and NYU has given me the benefit in my retirement of a stack pass to NYU's Bopst Library with its excellent clean toilet  facilities throughout the building, and this is on the south side of Washington Square.  And to the north there is the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural Science more or less across from each other on opposite sides of the park in the low eighties, good places to have membership cards, if only for the toilets.  So that pretty well covers things for me.  Still this morning I did not want to walk all the way back to Widener when my ultimate destination was in the opposite direction.  I would go to the Coop!  And then I discovered that their toilets on the third floor were just two rooms with a line out in the corridor.  Was it always like that? and that you could smell them from out in the hall?  Dismayed I started down to meet my friend, realizing that I would just have to wait for whatever restaurant he directed me to, and hope that it was large enough to use and clean enough to endure.  But  lo! on the floor below where I had been there was--miracle of miracles!--a sign directing the passerby to yet another toilet, empty, unclaimed, more or less from the look of it, unused.  Like finding the Hope Diamond in the sands of the Sahara!  A few minutes more I met my friend and wanted to blurt out the exciting discovery I had just made.  How strange then, that I kept silent, not willing to share this treasure even with him, all the more bizarre in that he was even then planning to leave Cambridge in another ten days, and as I knew was just that moment entering the Coop for the first and no doubt the last time.  But I will go to my grave with my  secret intact.  Of course, if anyone reads this . . . . .