About Your Father and Other Celebrities I Have Known by Peggy Rowe

Author:Peggy Rowe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Forefront Books
Published: 2020-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

POO-DINI

A WOMAN APPROACHED ME AT a social gathering and asked if it was true that I was the mother of that Dirty Jobs guy. I said that I was and braced myself for the usual glowing praise. I had gotten used to people telling me they loved my son—his message, his show, his voice, his looks …

“Tell him I said thanks,” she said, a little too vehemently. “My three-year-old grandson says poop every other minute of the day! I can’t take him out in public!” She rolled her eyes and walked away, muttering, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Since Dirty Jobs began, our son has been on intimate terms with poop from every imaginable source—or as he puts it, “feces from every species”—elephant, giraffe, penguin, dog, cow, horse, pig, bat, worm, pigeon, alligator, snake, monkey, lemur, and human.

At the conclusion of an episode where Mike had cleaned the hippopotamus pool at a zoo, my husband turned to me with that long-suffering expression. “Just another ordinary Tuesday night at home watching a grown son comb hippopotamus poop from his hair.”

In reality, we felt blessed. The previous Tuesday we had watched him reach into the rear end of a cow and pull fists full of fetid fecal matter from her bowels, commenting, “Holy crap!”

I grew up in a family of puritans where expletives like “Oh, shucks!” and “Darn it to heck” were considered crude. On rare occasions, Dad would paint the air blue with, “Go to war, Miss Agnes!” but was always contrite afterwards. My sister and I knew better than to say “shut up” or to utter the mother of all bad words: fart. In our house it was gas. Of course, with little ones, certain bathroom expressions were inevitable, even in my parents’ home. Those words were tee-tee and tu-tu. Certainly, nothing as vulgar as pee or poop or—God forbid—crap was ever uttered in our home.

When I married a veteran, who had most recently shared a college dorm with dozens of men, my vocabulary horizons expanded a tad. Still, there was no salty language or bathroom talk in our house, especially in the presence of our three sons.

When a Dirty Jobs fan joked that her family refers to Mike as “Poo-Dini” and asked if Mike has always had a fascination for poop, I gave it serious thought. Were we in any way to blame for our son’s romancing of poop on national television? Maybe those standing ovations for success during his potty training weren’t such a good idea after all.

Actually, young Mike had a healthy disdain for the stuff. Whenever I changed his baby brothers’ smelly diapers, he vanished like Cinderella at the stroke of midnight.

With one exception …

During one of my daily self-indulgences—an entire minute of privacy in the bathroom—our one-year-old reached through the playpen bars and feasted on dozens of big brother Mike’s colorful plastic Tiddlywinks. (For the record, four-year-olds are rotten babysitters.) I like to think he did not intentionally feed the colorful pieces to his baby brother.

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