Out of the closet and back again

I remember when "toilet-papering" was not a first-degree felony. It used to be a minor inconvenience or sometimes a godsend. Maybe we have come full circle with the toilet-paper thing.

Lots of things have gotten out of society’s collective closet in the past several years. My personal closet door still remains closed mostly, and I don’t intend to discuss what’s in there, but one thing I will talk about: those rolls of white stuff.

A generation ago, we sometimes carried a roll of toilet paper in the car’s jockey box, flattened under the owner’s manual, the registration, the extra fan belt, the Reader’s Digest and the eight-track tapes. Clear at the bottom, out of sight.

We carried it there just in case we got too far from home and what we politely called the little girls’ room, which is also one of those things that has come out of the closet. (Do I know what I am talking about?)

But it came out from the bottom of the glove box, and for a while there, kids carried a four-pack in the back seat of their cars just in case, while driving around, they found a likely house to toilet-paper.

"Toilet-paper" used to be a noun (well it still is, thank goodness), but somewhere along the line it became a verb meaning, according the Butterbean’s New World Dictionary, "the quaint practice of spreading toilet paper around someone else’s front yard, paying special attention to tree branches, mailboxes, basketball standards and other tall structures." Butterbean’s spells it with a hyphen since "head-hunting" was the first roughly comparable word that I came across in Webster’s while trying to decide whether it should have one.

This activity, I’m sure, contributed to the nation’s rising costs of toilet paper. In fact I’m surprised there weren’t real shortages. Wait a minute, there were—like in my house at ten o’clock on Friday nights. The grocery stores probably experienced a run on it every Saturday morning if not the night before.

On one Saturday night a few years back, I got caught without a square of it in the house. I could have sworn there was some in the closet. I couldn’t beg or bribe a soul to go to the store, so we went to bed hoping that we could survive without one of the necessities of life for just one night.
You might say that our prayers were answered. Come morning we had toilet paper growing on our trees. You just had to go out and pick some. By the end of the day we had cleaned up all of the manna and were wondering whether we had faith enough to skip the store run for one more day.

I think in the early days of the rise of the art of toilet-papering, being toilet-papered was supposed to be some sort of insult. But as time went on, it became a means of conveying all sorts of messages like: congratulations, good luck, I like you, you are a good old Joe who wouldn’t mind, or yours was the only house on the block whose light were out.

When I heard that people were toilet-papered, I advised them not to get excited, just to mellow out and settle for the "good old Joe" connotation or to not look a gift-horse in the mouth.

Whatever the intended message, or whichever way you used toilet paper, you had to be prepared to hide in the bushes so you wouldn’t get caught. If you got caught, it didn’t count.

And that was that. How something that harmless became a criminal offense, I don’t know. But it did. Toilet paper, or it’s unintended use, became the scourge of society, something the likes of which must be crushed and reconsigned to the closet, to sit there by its lonely self.