Continuing a Family Tradition

I'll apologize in advance for having two toilet-related blog entries in a row.  Hopefully I'll think of something different tomorrow.  But I'll warn you in advance that tomorrow's entry could very well involve toilets.  I just don't know.

I have many great memories from my childhood visits to my grandparents' house in Mount Pleasant, PA.  And now that they're both gone, I cherish those memories all the more.  It seems that now, though, I am reminded every day of one of the more unusual things about visiting them.  Of course I speak of:  The Toilets.

Their original house -- the same one where my dad grew up -- had a toilet with some sort of crippling plumbing problem, and anytime it was flushed you'd need to "jiggle the handle" to make sure it would fill up properly.  The result was that each and every time that my brother or I would announce that we were going to the bathroom, whichever grandparent was the closest at that moment would remind us:  "Don't forget to jiggle the handle!"

No matter how many times we'd visit the house, we would get that reminder from them.  It was pretty much an involuntary reflex on their part.  Upon hearing the word "bathroom," they would automatically reply with the jiggle the handle warning, without even necessarily realizing they were saying it.  Come to think of it, I do believe that they had similarly infected toilets at each of the three houses they occupied, so that tradition followed us over the years.

Now here we are, with our very own house with its very own toilets.  And, wouldn't you know, our downstairs toilet is starting to develop its own problem which can only be resolved by smashing it with a sledgehammer.  Ooops... I mean, the problem can be solved by jiggling the handle, and I find myself telling Little Smoot to do this when the toilet won't immediately refill.

Just carryin' on the tradition.