My Moment

In Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, Amy said,

PURPLE FLOWER

There is a single purple flower a couple of feet from where I am sitting. I am feeling poorly dressed and missing my long hair. I am at Café De Lucca in Bucktown, and there is a purple flower—that’s how I would define this moment. And you, your moment? Where are you at this moment? E-mail me and tell me. If you are the hundredth person to do so, I will bake you a pie and FedEx it to you. You will have to trust me on this.

I remember thinking to myself, “Wow. I can’t believe Amy is going to make me write to her and tell her that I’m sitting on the pot as I read this. That is my moment—reading on the pot.” In fact, I read most of her book in the bathroom. With two kids and a full-time job, my bathroom time is often the only chance I get to read. And if I should occasionally stay in there a little longer than is strictly necessary, who’s to say?

While my current lack of reading time might tempt me to linger in the john, I was a bathroom reader even when I had all the time in the world. It’s a family habit. Like my mother before me, I cannot tolerate being in the bathroom with nothing to read. If there are no books, magazines, or catalogs, I’ll read the label from the deodorant, the shampoo, whatever’s handy. My mom and I had a good laugh when we discovered that we both do that.

After I moved out on my own, I must have read the toothpaste tube dozens of times before I learned to properly stock the bathroom with reading material. Now there’s always something in there, if only an old issue of Smithsonian that I’ve already read from front to back, its pages wavy from the steam of dozens of hot showers, but at least it’s good-quality, educational reading with no inactive ingredients.

Anyway, I thought “my moment” was sort of funny. I wanted to tell it to someone. I even went to Amy’s web site with the intention of sharing it, but when I saw how many people had responded to that same paragraph, how popular the book had become, my story no longer felt fresh, but rather stale and wrinkled, like it had been sitting in the bathroom too long.

Oh well. I’ll share it with you instead. You don’t mind stale and wrinkled, do you? Feel free to print it out and read it in the bathroom. That is, after all, a great place to read.