Frog in toilet

Let me say this about that.

For all you guys out there looking forward to retirement, let me warn you that it’s nothing – NOTHING – like what you expect.  Remember the humongous change in your lifestyle when you went from ‘single man’ to ‘married man’?  Well, that’s nothing compared to the lifestyle change you are gonna experience when you retire.

When you were working, you were gone the better part of the day – or – as was my case, you were always travelling on business.  When you returned home, you were normally treated fairly well by your wife, due to the reassuring knowledge that you were going to be gone soon, and the wife could get back to her routine.  But after retirement, all that changes.

Retirement brings to your wife the disturbing realization that you are going to be around the house – all the time.  Since she has been running the house for the last thirty years, she logically assumes that you need to be trained in your new ‘stay-at-home’ lifestyle and initiates a  training program – in topics like:

a)  How to properly turn on a light switch

b)  Which position is reserved for the mustard in the refrigerator

c)  Which items go into the recycle bin

d)  The proper orientation of a new roll of toilet paper

e)  How to wash a dish before it’s placed in the dishwasher

 I never knew life at home was so complex.  Suffice to say, this type of thing will drive a grown man to the loony-bin.  So to preserve the peace in a long term relationship, the only option is…    for you to get the hell out of the house on a periodic basis.  This will allow the Mrs. to gorge herself on hours of watching Dancing With the Stars, The Bachelorette, and any number of cooking reality shows.  This arrangement is symbiotic as it allows you to get in some fishing with your buddies, drink beer, eat fatty foods, and fart in bed.  It was while I was on one such sanity-preserving trip that the following event occurred.

Mrs. Shambo rises one morning and stumbles into the bathroom, not fully awake and a little groggy from the previous night’s chardonnay-fueled ‘Chick Flick-athon’.  But, unknown to her, a large bullfrog had somehow gotten into the house, found a little pond of water in the commode and taken up residence.  (Now, there is also a theory that the baseball-sized toad entered the commode by crawling up through the sewer system, but that is just too disgusting to contemplate.)

Anyway, the wife enters the bathroom, lifts up her night gown and sits on the toilet.

Wife goes – pee …… Frog goes – jump ….. Wife goes – bananas

Apparently, the first thought that entered her mind was that the great cloven hand of Beelzebub himself was reaching up from the bowels of Hell to grab her by the ‘coochie’ and drag her down through the sewer into the nether-regions of Hades.  But alas, it was just a frog.

I was told later that the sound emanating from my house sounded like someone was being given a root canal, without anesthetic.  The wife levitates above the commode, and her feet begin spinning like the ‘Roadrunner’ in those cartoons.  She hits the floor – already running as fast as a frightened gazelle - and completes the three foot distance to the inside surface of the bathroom door – nose first.   More screaming.

My next door neighbor later reported hearing nothing, but then again, he has three teenage daughters and drinks heavily.  The neighbor, two doors down, says he was awakened by a horrific noise that sounded like someone was killing hogs in his front yard.  He rose and easily followed the commotion to my house and knocked on the front door.  He was greeted by the frantic Mrs. Shambo who looked a lot like (his description) Phyllis Diller had stuck her finger in a light socket.  He followed her into the bathroom and she pointed to the offending amphibian.  Upon further investigation, it appeared the frog has died during the episode, perhaps frightened to death, although my neighbor believes it may have committed suicide.

I returned home the following day, and upon hearing the story from my neighbor, collapsed into a fit of laughter until I could no longer breathe.  Mrs. Shambo, at this point a totally humorless victim of assault and battery – by frog – suggested that if I wanted to escape my own early demise, perhaps I should go sleep under a freeway overpass for a few weeks. 

And, that’s all I have to say about that.

Shambo