I said goodbye last week to a good friend…my 2018 Toyota Tacoma truck. I traded it in for a new 2021 Ford F 150. The Tacoma was a great truck but it had two downsides. One, the seats were torture for our aging bodies. At a certain age, even sitting hurts, one needs all the comfort they can get. Going for an hour drive was not fun. It is for younger people. Two, we are thinking about buying a small travel trailer and we needed something more sturdy to safely pull a trailer.

Still, my eyes got a little misty as I remembered how that truck helped me get out of the fire and how great the air conditioner worked after breathing so much smoke during the fire. It all came back to me as I traded the truck in. Trauma is like that I guess.

We did some RV’ing 25 years ago in a motor home. On our maiden voyage up the Oregon coast with 5 adults and one baby, we all agreed not to do the “big business” as my dear auntie called it, in the RV’s bathroom – just the “small business.” The reasoning was that we were new to the whole process and we weren’t sure of the entire procedure for “dumping the black water.” We would use public restrooms along the way.

After 3 days on the road, the holding tank meter suggested we should empty the “black water” so my son-in-law and I got down eye level by all the gadgets underneath the RV for emptying the tank into an RV park dump station. Carefully studying the process, making sure we had everything connected, we pulled the lever for the “black tank” to empty it with our faces inches from the connected sewer hose.

The contents swooshed through the tank into the sealed hose, but unfortunately for the two of us, we didn’t tighten the hose securely to the “black tank” exit portal. It disconnected, flew off and the system was now missing a vital component. It was also at that moment we discovered that our family had lied to us when they said they had not done any “big business.” They had in fact conducted a lot of big business and proof was inches from our faces.

The two of us started shouting “Oh shit, Oh fuck, Son of a bitch” but with our lips tightly closed as we stupidly tried to put the cap back on the drain causing the contents to go in a 360 degree pattern. Finally getting the cap twisted back on, we just stared at each other. One of us said, “I can’t believe that shit just happened to us.”

The other three adults were staying away from the process on the other side of the RV. One of them asked as we came around the corner, “How did it go?” One of us asked, “So, nobody did big business, huh?” All three of them said, “Well I might have gone once.” One of us responded, “Oh yeah, well we just witnessed a turd waterfall. We saw it up close too, real close. I counted at least 15 of them, maybe 20, damn maybe 50!”

Well, that is all I have to say tonight as I am looking at the full moon which will be in a complete lunar eclipse in less than 5 hours. I am certain Benny will be licking my face around 4:30 am to go play, so I’ll probably see it!