A person with full best friend status was married last Saturday. Congratulations S&D! A lot of people got up and spoke about the happy couple, generally about one or another, but mostly about the man (D). The difference has to do with a couple of things, one of which being the culture of the associated families and friends. D is from California with many family and friend connections in Latin America and elsewhere, while S (my friend) is a Minnesotan mainly with Minnesotan connections. Minnesotans just don’t do what D’s friends and family were doing: Talking about each other. Especially in front of other people.

At first I felt a little bad for S, but then I realized that the last thing she wanted anyone to do was to stand up and say stuff about her, on her behalf, tell stories, and so on. So although I was being encouraged to stand up and talk, I chose not to.

The other factor, at least for me, is that my relationship with S is very private. Not secret, or covert. Just private. I’m sure that many things have passed between us in conversation that would never be spoken by either of us to anyone else. It is just the nature of our personalities and how we happen to interact. In contrast, many of D’s stories (the stories told by his extensive network of family and friends) were clearly extensions of long running, widespread, somewhat loud and always entertaining conversations that have been going on. Indeed, D has several nicknames, and each nickname comes with an amusing story. S does not really have any nicknames (nor have I ever had one).

Were I to have stood up for S (who by the way, was best “man” for me at my own wedding just under a year ago) I would have to have told a couple of stories that are actually pretty funny to her and me, but that probably no one else would get or care about.

Until now.

I’ve just come across a web post on an interesting linguistically oriented blog called “rosettarants” located, on your local Internet, here. Don’t go look yet, you may ruin my story.

OK, so here is the story. S and I were traveling with a few others in South Africa, doing research. One of the members of our party, whom I will call “little-s” was not really, it turns out, a person to travel in such far away lands and experience such harsh conditions. She was a trooper in some ways, but her going on this trip was a bad decision. She left her boyfriend only days after he proposed (left in the sense of going on this trip, to return later … and by the way they are happily married now, I believe). She had not traveled before, except once, and it was a bad, home-sick experience. And we were, after all, in a place where 1 out of 3 (according to my own fairly extensive experience in this area) young Midwestern suburban white girls believe, well, that they will die or something bad like that.

OK, now we have to hold that thought and go back in time. Some months earlier, I had been traveling in Japan, on a lecture tour. While there, I found out that the Japanese have the coolest ever appliances. They have refrigerators and washing machines that make so much more sense than the American styles, that it is just unbelievable. Then, they have an amazing array of toilets. Some of the toilets have a lot of buttons and stuff that you can press to get various results.

I had been telling S about this one day, in South Africa, and explained that you did not have to know Japanese to use the toilets. There were symbols on each button, and they were generally absolutely hysterical … imagine, what symbols would you use for functions built into a do-everything electronic toilet?

Take a moment and think about that.

OK, so, I drew a couple of the symbols for S to see what I was talking about, and we had a great laugh about that. There might have been some wine drinking going on as well. The wine in South Africa is so good and so cheap, how could there not have been? Anyway, we had a big laugh about these symbols.

So anyway, one day, out in the bush somewhere, and little-s had been sinking more and more deeply into a funk about being where she was. She had started to get paranoid that big-S, some of the others, and me were having fun at her expense … which, honestly, we were not doing, or at least trying really hard to not do. But you know how it is. Somebody gets into a bad state, and repeats the same behaviors over and over again, and it gets a little absurd. One gets alarmed at this. Then one gets a little frustrated. Then mad. Then finds it funny. Somewhere along the line one does something about it … has a talk with the girl … and believe me, I did that a number of times, with no effect. Anyway, right or wrong, and mostly wrong, little-s got into a funk where she got a little paranoid about the rest of us.

So one day big-S and I are returning to camp, on foot, and little-s comes running up to us in a panic. “The phone company called” she said (we had a cell phone). “They said they were going to shut off service unless you call this number.” (they did that whenever our minutes got low, then I would enter a secret number and get more minutes … routine … but little-s did not know about this.) “What are we going to do when the phone is shut off” (use the pay phone over by the ranger station, actually … but whatever).

Little-s came running over to Big-S and me, expressing these concerns, red faced, in tears, and waving around a piece of paper. I took the paper, and Big-S and I could both see that there was a phone number written on it.

But next to the phone number was something else. See, this piece of scrap paper … the one little-s had written the phone number on … was the same piece of paper that had one of the Japanese toilet symbols on it.

Now, Big-S and me, we had forgotten about the toilets. But this symbol, shown here:

reminded us of it.

I’m absolutely certain that little-s did not even see this symbol. It was kind of off in the corner of the paper, non-central, nondescript, almost non-visible. But Big-S and I, well, that’s all we saw. We already knew the phone number was not important. It was already obvious that little-s was panicking over nothing. If little-s had been paying attention instead of hiding in her tent all the time she would know about the phone. And the fact that she spent hours of time and hundreds of dollars (not all her own money) on the phone had kind of dulled us to her concerns. And so on.

And there was this symbol. A heinie with something spraying on it.

hei·nie (hn)
n. Slang
The buttocks.

We tried. We tried to hold in that which could not be held in. Had we been drinking something it would have been Danny Thomas time. You know, where the guy spits out a mouth full of coffee. A great wave of hysterical, uncontrollable can’t-hold-it-in laughter overcame both of us. Big-S and I were on the ground in stitches. Little-s ran away and was not seen for several hours.

Here’s a blow-up of the toilet: