Stepping In It

If you want to get a real belly laugh out of a child all you have to do is tap them on the shoulder and say the word poop. It gets them every time. Little kids find poop and anything related to poop to be hysterically funny. Many adults do too—the difference is that adults understand that things related to excrement are not socially acceptable and so they do not laugh.

This morning I had the unfortunate task of getting ready to attend a funeral mass. The church was a bit of a distance away so I had to take care to watch the clock and allow for glitches—except that I didn’t do a fabulous job of watching the clock and so I was running a late.

And I was fully dressed but for my bare feet when I let the dogs out as my last chore before leaving the house. And as I walked back through the dining room, on the corner of the area rug, my right foot encountered a cold soft slippery wet mass. And the sensory nerves in my foot sent the information to my brain. My brain in turn determined that this was not a good thing. And instinctively my brain ordered my foot to rapidly recoil. And upon rapid recoil some of the debris that had adhered to my foot flew off my foot and now adhered itself to the dining room wall. There was yuck on my foot, yuck on the rug, and yuck plastered and embedded in my stucco wall. And then I began to curse—profusely—with hard core choice words. And I knew which dog was responsible. It was not Cosmo. Cosmo looked at me and said Eww—don’t look at me--I would never do that and he walked away.

So I hopped on one foot (the clean one) into the kitchen and put my unclean foot under the sink’s faucet and washed my foot with antibacterial soft scrub and then went back to the dining room to clean and sanitize the remaining mess. All the while God heard a lot of damning. And now I was really late for the funeral mass. And when I got into the car I called Elaine and we laughed and I felt better.

The colloquialism He/she stepped in **it is meant to connote that one has been the beneficiary of good luck—random good fortune. It is meant to describe a fortuitous experience. I sure hope so because when I came home from the funeral and walked barefoot in the yard I stepped in it again. So I guess now I am twice as lucky. Maybe I should play the lottery.