Humiliation
by Wayne Nylin
Though the toilets in the far end of each section of the basement (boys to the right, girls to the left) were hidden by a wooden partition, the sharp tang of pine tar gave their location away. Often there’d be a high school kid or two down there throwing a ball around or just gabbing. Daring, we thought, enviable. If they could do it, why not us? And so, many of us did. We’d simply ask to ‘go’ and rarely were we refused; that is, until just recently, when this breach of common sense had been discovered and teachers began to clamp down and grant fewer requests to go to the washroom.
Upstairs on the first floor were the grades 1-6 rooms. And in our 5-6 classroom the soft murmuring of kids settling in for the afternoon was punctuated by random coughs and the sniffing and snuffling of runny noses, the air fetid with the stench of wet woollen mittens laid out on the hissing radiators, and the smell of still-damp 10 and 11 year olds just in from noon hour play.
And finally, at our desks, we sat listening intently to “IT’S FUN TO DRAW”, a monthly hour-long radio program our teacher often used for an art lesson. The narrator’s descriptions put us immediately with the spectators in the crowded stands at the Calgary Stampede. We could ‘see’ it all, the steer riding, the rodeo clowns, the calf roping and the cowboys on their bucking horses. On our desks, each of us had newsprint, art paper, paint sets and a jar of paint water. Our task was first to draw and then to paint the pictures our imaginations conjured up. It really was fun to draw.
20 minutes into the broadcast, in the midst of just beginning to paint, I suddenly had the urge to ‘go’. I raised my hand and asked.
“No,” and pointing to the radio, “this is the middle of a program,” she hissed. I waited for what seemed an unreasonably long time, trying in vain not to squirm in my seat, raised my hand once more, and pleaded, “Please, may I go?”
“No, I told you, now settle down!”
I could hold it not a moment longer. There was nothing for it but to sit there and let fly. And oh, the spreading liquid warmth, almost hot it felt, but I could not halt the flow, gushing and streaming, ’til I was drained, and ah…the relief… now complicated, of course, by the embarrassment of having peed my pants. It began dripping onto the floor. I knocked over my paint water which, fortunately, coloured the liquid on the seat of my desk and on the floor.
“Oh…now look what you’ve done! Why can’t you sit still?” and she sent someone to the janitor’s room for a mop.
Being a clumsy oaf spilling my paint water was less of a stigma than being a 10-year-old pant-wetter. At the end of the day, the long stiff-legged walk home that -30 degree January afternoon, legs spread apart, wet, sagging long johns, icy cold jeans, and in my nether regions by the time I reached home, a tiny ‘bud’ and two little ‘marbles’ drawn up high, hunting for heat.
-Wayne Nylin
I am a retired teacher living in Red Deer. As a member of the INK BLOTS retired teachers’ writing group of CARTA, I enjoy a bit of writing and discussion at our twice-monthly meetings, on pieces we have written.
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