For the record, these days I have no idea what my rear end looks like. At home, we've got at least one full-length mirror, but I don't know that I was ever vain or nutty enough to spin around and survey the scene.
I was a high school jock. I've taken a thousand locker room showers with countless other male Nakeds. It was impossible not to see loads of other posteriors, so I think I know what a tush on an old man looks like--what I look like--with one exception: I’m slow-dancing towards eighty. The lot of us, if left undraped would most certainly look. . .well, how should I say it?—forlorn and droopy.
But I've never looked in that full-length bedroom mirror, so I swear I don't know what kind of impression my own bare posterior might make.
I know the bundle I carried was of considerable heft years ago, when I couldn't have won wind sprints if the other guys wore ankle weights. I remember being a lousy hitter because I knew that if I swung hard I could slam a good pitch 500 feet in our fence-less ball diamond and, if I was lucky, end up on third. My butt was a burden. It's true. My coach told me it was simple: I ran too long in one place.
But that was a thousand years ago. In college, I'll never forget being at a motel swimming pool with friends. Later, alone, this girl I was seeing told me that some of her friends told her I had cute buns.
Cute buns. That was sometime during the Paleozoic Era.
Right now, there's no chance of my checking out what's behind me. Besides, I'd rather not know.
All of which is a dirty shame because what I discovered, living in a nursing home's rehab center as I did, I couldn't begin to count the number of women who pulled down my pants. Dozens of ‘em, all shapes and sizes have come face-to-face with my keister. Sometimes, it seems I've hosted whole gatherings of nurses in front of the toilet, but mostly it's just two of them tugging down sweat pants one more time before I take the throne.
Morning comes. "Wanna change your briefs?" one says.
Just nod, and down they come, full Monty.
Listen, it takes some moral, emotional, and spiritual adjustment for a still sane, 76-year-old retired Professor of Literature to adjust to full frontal nudity before a bevy of CNAs. But they're sweet about it, and quick too, which is nice.
For my first bath--I hadn't taken a bath since the early years of this century and never, well, in public--a sweetheart named Mollie smiled when I let her know I wasn't yet at home being buck naked in her cold plastic bath chair. "Oh, get over it," she said. "This ain't my first rodeo."
I'll admit it--that helped. I’m sure it’s not my last global exposure, but when some time in the future I’m once more a resident and my drawers come down again, I got this to tell myself for sure—whatever comes along down the pike, it won’t be my first rodeo either, sister.
