The Water Closet

The other day I remembered a paper that I had written for one of my classes in 2005. The teacher gave us a few subject choices and I choose to write about an interesting bathroom that I had been in. I decided to write about one in one of the apartments I lived in on my mission. I'm sorry that I haven't been able to find a picture. For those that want to know it was the one in Chalan Kanoa on Saipan.

The Water Closet

All human dwelling places must have a place for the disposal of human waste. Cabins have outhouses with squeaky doors and wild critters lurking nearby. Mansions have grand tiled rooms with scented toilet paper and porcelain badae. There are many different types of bathrooms. This is the story of one such room.

There it was—the bathroom to put all other bathrooms to shame. To be quite honest the bathroom could not have looked any other way and fit into the apartment it was part of. The bathroom was a walled off corner of the bedroom in an apartment measuring nine feet by thirty-five feet. The apartment had been used by several other young men who were living without mothers to clean the bathroom, or any of their other rooms for that matter.

Upon entering the bathroom, the first thing a person would notice was that the floor was about an inch lower than the rest of the apartment. If the room were entered at an angle perpendicular to the door the person would find themselves looking at themselves in the mirror from the shoulders down. The height of the mirror was perfect for adjusting ones tie but not for much else. In order to look directly at ones face one would have to lean over. This really wasn’t bad if you didn’t mind the close up of the toothpaste splatter reflected on your face, but was bad if you wanted to see just your face.

Turning away from the mirror to face the rest of the bathroom the next thing you would encounter was the toilet. Sitting on the toilet, like a gargoyle on a perch, one would realize that it seemed to be raised about an inch. This odd height could cause one to think that the bathroom was not always an inch lower than the adjoining bedroom. Perhaps the tile floor was like a notepad. When the floor became too dirty all one had to do was tear off the top sheet of floor and there would be a clean one beneath. Judging by the cleanliness of the floor this had not been done for a long time, or, the bottom of the “notepad” had been reached.

The shower was an odd contraption. It wasn’t a tub and it wasn’t one of those standing showers, it was…just there at the end of the room. The shower seemed to be kind of an after thought. The only thing separating it from the rest of the room as a shower curtain and a two-and-a-half foot high tiled wall. The tile was the same on the inside and the outside of the shower except for the strange film on the floor inside the shower. This film must have been the most indestructible entity in the universe. There was nothing that could get rid of it, not even the amazing power of Oxy-Clean!

Actually taking a shower was an adventure. The water pressure was so low that the shower head actually had to be taken off because the water almost couldn’t, or wouldn’t, go through it. With the shower head off it was like taking a shower in a drinking fountain. This was no ordinary drinking foundation—the water that came out of the shower was saltwater. This made perfect sense, though. Saltwater came out of every faucet in the apartment. This was because this apartment was located on an island in the Pacific Ocean.

There are many types of bathrooms. There is something unique about each of them. That uniqueness is what we remember about each one that we happen to use. These things make a bathroom more than a bathroom. They make it a memory.