Strange How Many Memories a Roll of Toilet Paper Evokes

How do you feel when someone uses something you need to replace?

Things like coffee filters, paper towels, diapers, toilet paper, etc.

It's not just a roll of toilet paper. It's a trip to the grocery store, a decision, a trip home, a trip from the car to the kitchen table and another trip to the bathroom to unpack it and hang it.[1]

A few dollars is a nice gesture, but it doesn't replace the work work involved in obtaining it.

Something nice no one will remember but me: When Mom and Dad visited, they often brought their own toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner, and yes, toilet paper. Not because mine wasn't good enough, but because they understood this principle.

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General Patton used the term "paper hanging sons of bitches" and I never understood what that meant. My child's mind assumed they were sloppy wallpaper hangers. I didn't learn until I watched the the first movie version of In Cold Blood, that "hanging paper" meant writing bad checks. Hence Patton presumably meant "someone you can't trust."

Dad loved the movie Patton. He watched it often. He didn't like Patton's potty mouth. One of my favorite versions of A Christmas Carol is George C Scott's, which came out in 1984, at a time when I was falling in love, someone else wasn't, and I was alone as Christmas Eve approached.

But my all time favorite, bar none, is the musical with Albert Finney in the title role. I first watched that with Dad and brother Tom when I was very little. It wasn't the first Christmas Carol I was introduced to, but it was the first that spoke to my heart in the way I suspect Dickens had intended, and does to this day, right up to the very end where Scrooge speaks to the lion doorknocker through which his dead partner Jacob Marley had first spoken to him: "I'm going to celebrate Christmas with my family." He sounds old and tired at that moment, but also truly restored.

One Christmas while I was young and in college and unmarried, brother Tom and I went to see Albert Finney's Scrooge at the Strand theater in downtown Erie. It was a day or two after Christmas and not quite the same, but nice nonetheless. The Strand is now home to the Erie Playhouse.

Strange how many memories a roll of toilet paper evokes.


Started: 2012-06-24