Toilet Trained

Toilet Trained
by Abraham Lincoln

Toilets were necessary when I was born in 1934. That is one of the first lessons I had to learn: pooping and peeing were human functions but parents were not thrilled when their cute baby did them in a diaper momma was going to have to wash, so the diaper could be pinned on the clothesline, in the sunshine, with wooden clothespins, on number 9 clothesline wire, that had to be washed off, to make it clean for clean clothes to hang on.

The first lesson was to use the toilet; but it was a creepy place and if you leaned over and looked at the bottom of the seat, it was covered with bugs and big spiders that might bite your bottom-end poking through the hole in the toilet seat.

Dad called our outside toilet a privy; and it didn't start out being the dilapidated structure it was, leaning askew, practically setting in the alley behind our house, but it was where adults went to do their business. I was too little to crawl up and set on the seat so I had to use a chamber pot.

There was a white porcelain pot and matching lid that sat by the kitchen stove. Anybody could use it, but I grew up thinking it was my pot and I was unhappy to raise the lid and see what looked like momma's tea filling the pot. Momma had to empty the pot in the toilet before I could use it. It was clean enough for me to pee in when she set it down beside the kitchen stove.

My mother was proud as punch when she realized she got me "toilet trained," because she didn't have to wash dirty diapers and hang them out to dry in the sunshine. She told anyone who came to our house that her little boy was toilet trained and she told people she met at the grocery store that I was a big boy now; and they smiled.

I had blond curls in my hair and momma wanted me to be a girl so bad that she often dressed me in one of the dresses she made for her little girl. I suppose I looked like a girl with blond curly hair. The men laughed at the way I looked and my dad didn't appreciate it so he took me, one day, to see Henry Meyers.

Henry had a little house with a big chair that swiveled round and round. He spoke to my dad and then Henry told me he would give me a penny if I sat still. I agreed and he slapped a board across the arms of the barber chair and told me to set down.

My big curls began to fall down around me and all of them ended up around the barber's chair on the floor. Dad paid him some money and Henry gave me a penny. I held onto that penny all the way home. It was the first real money that I ever earned.

I smiled at Tommy Rice, the village blacksmith, who stood up straight and smiled back and said something to my dad. Dad took out a big wad of Mail Pouch Chewing tobacco and stuck it in his mouth and spit out the ball already in his mouth before he said, I hope his mother likes it; he looks like a boy now and not a girl.

We walked on home and opened the door and went inside and mother screamed my name and came over to the door where I stood and hugged me, and I think she even kissed me. She cried because all my beautiful blond curls were gone. She gave my dad the dickens but I called it the "devil."