Flushed Away

My grandmother gave me a necklace for my golden birthday. It was my name, written in gold, with a peridot dangling from the end. At 8 years old, it was perhaps the fanciest thing I had ever owned, but sadly, its fate was not to become an heirloom. See, I drop kind of a lot of things in the toilet. When my necklace fell into the toilet that fateful day, not long after I’d received it, I was too squeamish to go in after it, and too shy to retrieve a parent. (Hm. That makes you think twice about having kids.) Years of experience have curbed the nausea a little bit, but I still get shivers down my spine and wash my arms practically up to the pits whenever I’ve gotta go in. The usual suspects: hairbrushes (too big to flush); makeup; maybe a hairdryer now and again, etc. Every time it happens, I think about the necklace that I didn’t rescue.

Why, just this afternoon, I was fumbling to get out of the bathroom stall at work (which is impossibly small and whose door opens inward so that you practically have to be in the toilet yourself to get out of there), purse in hand, and somehow I lost my grip and *SPLASH* went my purse, right into the toilet as the final flush funnel swished around the bowl.

You can’t make this stuff up.

I used a paper towel to minimize the drippage, and carried my purse the 75 feet or so back to my office, held as far away from me as I could get it. I explained to my office mate what had happened as I grabbed two plastic bags from my filing cabinet and started going through the purse contents to salvage what I could. Thankfully, it seems the purse got the worst of it. I finished my sorting, calmly but quickly went to the sink and resisted the urge to bathe in it, and went about my day.

Which, by the way, started with me almost knocking myself unconscious on the kitchen counter in my office. But that’s a story for another day.