An Awkward Moment At The Good Place

Last Sunday the high reached 90 degrees Fahrenheit. R and I decided to go for a run on the pedestrian trail of the newly renovated Myrtle Edwards and Centennial Park. You can’t really tell the difference between the two parks, but while Myrtle Edwards is maintained by the City of Seattle and Centennial Park is maintained by the Port of Seattle. As soon as we stepped outside, felt the heat. It impacted the skin with an almost physical feeling. Heat like this is rare in Seattle. Normally the summer air is balmy, not hot, warm enough to get by with a T-shirt, but you might want to keep a shirt or a cardigan nearby if you plan on dining on someone’s backyard patio.

We crossed the Seattle fairgrounds and exited on Sue Bird Court North. A line of cars with the FIFA logo were parked at the curb and were pulling away in a synchronized and orderly fashion. One of the cars had its windows down and the driver hollered to Roberta if she wanted some water. She went over to the car and the driver handed her two bottles of water, free. I left home with a bottle of water holstered at my hip, but the extra two would no doubt get consumed rather quickly.

We felt the air cool noticeably as we approached Puget Sound, but the heat was still quite evident. I didn’t see any seagulls, which is quite unusual. The only birds we saw were the bird deterrents – hawklike scarecrows on high flexible poles that wobble around – planted in all the areas where lawns had been seeded with new grass.

Eliott Bay Connections, the contractor who renovated the two parks for a payment of 56 million dollars, did a good job. It was much more attractive and had a lot more amenities and the landscaping had been done with an eye toward a thriving ecology native to the region. This included native plants such as tufted hair grass, holly-leaved mahonia, snowberry and evergreen huckleberry, pollinator meadows and 12,000 trees, including twisted pine, red alder, Sitka spruce, black cottonwood and the Patmore ash. There are multiple sites equipped with wooden benches for viewing a sunset or a misty ultramarine morning with sparkly waves and a few whitecaps.

A significant new addition is the cedar-clad public amenities pavilion, baptized haʔłali (pronounced hah-THLAH-Lee), a Lushootseed word meaning “The Good Place.” It included a little Scandinavian café, equipped with outdoor benches and picnic tables, some public bathrooms, a spot where joggers and bicyclists can replenish their water bottles, and a couple of drinking fountains.

Unfortunately, the bathrooms are gender free. Meaning men and women and anyone in-between are free to share the facilities. I’m entirely uncomfortable with this assignation. I miss the convenience of urinals and the ability to swing in and out of a men’s room without having to touch anything. Other than myself, of course. I’m also intensely uncomfortable relieving my body of its waste within easy whispering distance of a completely strange woman. I feel embarrassed around men much less women. The stalls are all quite private and have lockable doors, but a panel wall won’t stop the various sounds emerging from one’s evacuations.

I went to hang my holster with the bottle of water on a hook attached to the inner door and the bottle fell out and hit the floor. Shit, I said. What now? It’s important to know that I’m OCD. I have contamination fears. A water bottle dropped on a bathroom floor is catastrophic.

Normally, in any public rest room, I freeze. No matter how badly I have to go, if I’m lacking privacy and feeling uncomfortable, my body will freeze. My bladder will shut tight as a high-resistance bolt on a railroad bridge. I have to turn therapist and coax my bladder into releasing its pressure-building fluid. Compounding my problem is an over-sized prostate. The medical term - Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia – which refers to a non-cancerous (benign) increase in the number of cells in the prostate gland, which surrounds and squeezes – blocks - the urethra.

And yet I did. I let it go. That problem solved, I emerged from my stall to tell my wife (after my initial shock of finding her in a men’s room, which was no longer a men’s room, but an everyone’s room) that I dropped the water bottle on the floor and wasn’t sure how to handle this problem. “I just mopped the floor,” shouted the attendant, a Hispanic middle-aged woman in a yellow vest seated by the wall. “Thank you,” I shouted back, “that’s good to hear.” The next thing I said seemed to burst out of me of its own volition. “I hate these gender-free bathrooms,” I said. She looked surprised, of course. “Imagine,” I said, hoping to ease the tension I’d just created, “you’re on a very special date.” R, who was just then taking the precaution of washing the water bottle at the sink, gave me an amused look. She knew what was coming. “And you and your very special date have just eaten a dinner of spicy seafood, which, some minutes later, is raising hell in your digestive systems. And now here you are in adjacent bathroom stalls, producing a veritable symphony of profoundly embarrassing and disgusting primordial noises, great borborygmic gurgles and burbles of serious biological waste. Will you even have the courage to face your date after this?” The attendant, being someone with a good sense of humor, laughed heartily at this. “My wife and I,” I threw in for good measure, “have been married 31 years. She’s heard every possible noise my body can make.” And she laughed all the harder.