Gotta Find Something To Say….By Kevin Boyle….
Ok, it’s not going in the history books and it’s not clean enough for Reader’s Digest but I gotta share a little story. Wait, is Reader’s Digest still published? It’s hard to tell. If you’re in a doctor’s office (waiting and waiting and slowly I turn) you might come across an old Reader’s Digest. Or it might just look old. The little magazine could’ve been sitting there since the 1960s or arrived last week. It never changes. Or if it has, I haven’t noticed.
Reader’s Digest was a good place for little stories and quick humor. Now, such things, of course, go online –and in most cases, are never to be found.
It’s kinda like the tree falling in the forest and whether it makes a sound or not. The reason we all know that question is because it really can be debated. So don’t tell me you have the right answer. Of course, the question is so familiar it’s given birth to a lame joke or two: If a man speaks in a forest and there is no woman around, is he still wrong?
Anyway, unless things are written down, in some place where people can find them, good little stories become the tree that didn’t make a sound. I’m twisting that old philosophical question into a pretzel of a metaphor so maybe I just better get to my slightly off-color true story.
In polite western society men stand side by side at public urinals. It’s the way it is. And because that’s the way it is, it’s ok to talk about them in this column, right? Like urinals, this is a public space.
More often than not you’re shoulder to shoulder with somebody you’ve never met and are unlikely to ever meet again. There are no Roberts Rules; no handbook of proper etiquette. Do you exchange pleasantries? How ‘bout them Mets? Or do you stare straight ahead and not say boo? The size of the men’s room has a lot to do with the conversational flow, so to speak.
If you’re in a big room with a bank of urinals, like at a stadium, you don’t say anything. You get in; get out. But if you’re in a tiny room with, say, two urinals, it gets a little tricky. There’s only one rule: Don’t get too friendly.
Really, there’s not much to say but we’re pretty much trained to acknowledge another human that we could literally rub shoulders with. If a guy next to you says, How ‘bout them Mets? It’s no time to tell the guy you like the Yankees or start a discussion. You say one or two words or three – Ya Gotta Believe– and then zip and leave.
Three men I know, one older than the other two, happened to be in a men’s room with three urinals. Because they knew each other the conversation had to be better than How ‘bout them Mets?
One guy—ok, it was my brother —- decided it was a perfect time for a philosophical debate. What size bill would it have to be for you to fish it out of the urinal? “I think it’d have to be at least a fifty,” one guy says. My brother says it’d have to be a full hundred-dollar bill.
The last guy says, “I grew up in the Great Depression, I’d go in for a quarter.”
You won’t find that in The Greatest Generation or in Reader’s Digest but now it’s written down, maybe with the chance to live on in history. And hey, if no one responds, I’ll know it didn’t make a sound in the forest.
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