Saturday, November 8, 2014

Every Once In A While Your Mother Shares a Memory You've Never Heard Before and You Think, OKAY....I Guess

My mother and father are having their upstairs bathroom redone. For a month, my sisters and I have heard about the oddity that it will be that my mom can't take a shower. Then Cynderballz reminded her that she will also have to walk down the stairs to use the bathroom at night.

Uh Oh. She didn't think of that.

This, of course, triggered memories of when my mom lived on Milford Street in Hamilton, New York and how she had a chamber pot to use at night, in which she emptied every morning. I didn't know this until my mom shared a story of the time my Grannie Annie decided to scare my mom coming down the stairs after a long night's sleep. My mother's evening dew flew in the air, soaking my grandma and her and my grandmother sang,
Never say boo, when she comes down he stairs, or else you get pee in all of your hairs (I don't think I caught this exactly, but will change it when I get the right rhyme - I was simply in shock that peeing in a pot was my mother's norm.
This just in (the official AnERip quip):
Never say boo to thee coming down the stairs with a pot of pee. 
Then Cynderballz clarified for me that she and Casey used to pee in bowls upstairs, too, and loved to dump them in the morning. "Um, Bryan. You don't remember? That's the reason we really loved spending the night there. So we could pee in bowls."

I have zero memory of this, but I'm mesmerized at the truth of it. How could I, Bryan Ripley Crandall, not know about this piece of authentic family history? I want to know more. This is the kind of genetic magistracy that keeps me alive and well. I've decided I need to drain my mother of all her stories this holiday season: the good, the bad, and the pee pee. I need to know more.

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