I'll Have the Pu Pu Platter, Please

The next morning is hazy. We are hazy. We go to our restaurant to soothe our souls with breakfast.

And so I have to admit something. Scott and I have a ritual.

I am sharing here, people. No laughing.

Scott and I have known each other for what amounts to dog years. I was 15 when I met him. We are as close and have shared as much as any couple who has been together for decades. We are on the accelerated program. I think dating in middle age does that to you. You speed date through and discard the Throw Away Mates, and when you find a Keeper, you go from zero to sixty in three dates. There isn't much of a Getting To Know You stage. No honeymoon. Practicality (and presumably the notion that you have to pack a whole happy life into what remains of your actual chronological life compels you to waste very little time tap dancing around things like the fact that you have to sleep on the right side of the bed with one foot outside of the covers or that you get Very Loud Hiccups if you eat ice cream.)

But Scott and I have one reserved Politeness. After breakfast, or more specifically, after coffee, we both have to retreat to a bathroom to let Mother Nature do her little dance of joy. And our unspoken ritual is always the same. At home, Scott takes one one bathroom and I to the other. At his house, it is understood that he and his Droid will be spending quality time in his girls' bathroom and I will be taking my iPhone into the master bath for a few moments of solitude.

At my house, I commandeer the hall bath on the second floor, while Scott retreats to the hideous little almost-an-outhouse affair in my dank basement. He refers to it as the Executive Washroom. Which is hilarious, because it is so elementary that it does not even have a sink to wash one's hands in...afterward. Eeeww.

When we travel, which is admittedly not that often, we have to figure out the routine. Here in Key West, we've been keeping it simple. We eat breakfast each morning at the hotel's outdoor waterfront restaurant. And once the coffee has percolated through our systems, we pay the bill, and Scott goes to the restaurant men's room and I return to the hotel room to use the one there.

This morning, like so many before it, I Do My Business, and feeling quite satisfied, turn to flush. The water rises. And then nothing. Just some slow, umm, swirling.

OMG. I have clogged the toilet in the hotel room that I share with my dashing boyfriend.

And suddenly I am in a flopsweat. My cover is blown. Scott will know I actually poop. I may as well fart too. I am doomed.