A very, very good chance of showers

Quin has been using is pee as a weapon. I'm not saying he sprays us down while laughing like an evil villain. When he gets mad or sad he accompanies the already traumatic moment by moistening his surroundings. Tonight he went just for the heck of it. We were sitting on the couch and our once master of everything toilet announced he'd peed. And he had. He didn't even flinch. He just let it go and then laughed about it. I nearly flew off the handle which led Sarah to scold me instead of the perpetrator.  By then I was calming myself with a little introspection. You see, I don't have any ground to talk. I wet the bed until I was, well let's just say I was well past Q's age.

I still remember very clearly one of the reasons why getting out of bed seemed like the bad option. We lived in an old house in Allenspark, Colorado. It's actually called the White House, now on White House Drive, because it was owned by Ethel and Graybul White. They bequeathed it to my parents. It was a quaint little place of mostly sentimental value right up until we lost it to the bank. Damn bulldozer. (Let that be a lesson to any of you children who want to grow up to be an environmentalist AND a logger.) Now it's owned by wealthy hippy spawn (my assumption) and like every other piece of gentrified property fifty miles of Boulder is worth more than the Lord.

Anyway, back when we lived there it was still just an old little house in the country. And it also had a shed with a door that in the wind slammed right outside my bedroom window. In my head, though, it wasn't a door. I'd conjured a skeleton banging a drum. That was good for a bed spraying or two. Add to that the mice that ran around in our attic. To me they were batteries rolling down the roof. Batteries rolled by aliens with big heads. Chalk up another tinkle.

We didn't have TV, and my brother and I had to walk up the road to my grandma's house to see our favorite shows. Well I didn't have favorite shows, my big brother Pete did, so I adopted his. This meant I had to watch Star Trek, and I don't know if you remember this or not, but over the ending credits there's that awful howling chorus and a picture of a creepy alien with a big head. That freaked me out. And once something gets in my head it stays. This can be a positive thing, as in the case of Spiderman in Electric Company. My brother and I happened to catch an episode one day and I was blown away that the real--not a cartoon--Spiderman made a cameo. So then I kind of became obsessed with seeing him again.  I would escape to grandma's at all hours to watch TV. One night Pete was into some awful movie about some creepy doctor in a cave (Pete, help me out here). There was death and, as I would recall over and over, skeletons. I was terrified, but kept watching certain that Spiderman was going to show up. He didn't, and the movie never gained the lightness and levity of Electric Company, so I was left to wander around my grandma's house awake and terrified until I collapsed in the den. And wet my pants.

I was surrounded by scary things.

There is one other thing that's kind of strange about my bedwetting. It also provides perspective as to how much work Quin is as compared to what I must have been for my parents. To help calm my fear of, well, pretty much everything, I made sure I was as close as possible to all my stuffed animals. I felt it was for their best interest to be tucked into my underwear. So my mom had sheets and pajamas to wash, as well as Pyzer the puppet dog, and Mole, and Lion and a few other animals probably much happier rotting at the bottom of a landfill.

What hit me with Quin's incident tonight were two very clear memories of my feral pees. The first is positive. I remember waking up to my mom clapping and cheering because I'd made it through the night without waterboarding my woodland creatures. That's a positive that I'd rather remember, and that's how I'd like to deal with Quin: make it positive before he has some major negatives to deal with. That brings me to my second memory.

I think I was in the fifth grade.  My bedwetting was mostly limited to how badly I could scare myself sleeping next to a basement level window in the woods twenty-five miles from civilization. So it was pretty common, but I was certain I would be able to contain it during a sleepover at Brent Osborne's house.

And then Gould, a GHOST town.

Brent lived in town.  Of the twenty-four kids in the class of '92, Brent was certainly in the top half of cool. He wore thick glasses to see, but he'd proven himself fastest in the class, and he had a motorcycle. He was very much someone with whom you wanted to make a good impression. So when I woke up, and in our shared queen-sized bed realized my pajamas were soaked with urine, apparently mine, I went to work on what could be one of the greatest cover ups of all time.

I quietly got out of bed, removed my PJs, and put on my clothes. I then went about removing the sheets.  I had to pull Brent out of the bed, where he'd stand in his underwear, groping for his glasses and wondering what was going on. I explained to him that my parents were strict in making sure I helped clean up after my stay. I ripped off the sheets and helped him back under the covers.

Later, his mom would find me standing on a kitchen chair trying to work her washing machine. Tying her robe and rubbing her eyes she'd ask what I was doing. I explained my parent's mandate. She said something about four in the morning being a little early, and I just stared at her, and then at the perplexing washing device, hoping to somehow bring the two together. She obliged and wandered back to her room before stopping and inquiring as to where and in what condition her son was sleeping.

Soon Brent was standing in his underwear again and, in his blurry darkness, asking why I was making the bed. I don't remember if I had an answer, and I know I didn't when hours later he woke me up and asked why I was sleeping in my clothes. At the time I thought I'd completely bamboozled Brent and his mother. Now I think it must have been pretty obvious, my mother showing up and getting my pajamas washed, dried and folded. At least I didn't stuff anything of Brent's in my underwear.

Despite the save, I don't want Quin to go through any late-night bedding exercises to keep his cool in school. Peeing on your friend's bed is about as close to social genocide as you can get.  Hopefully he can make it to college, where that kind of thing is hilarious.