Jiggle the What?

I had an aunt who was dropped on her head while being born out of my grandma. Not kidding. Apparently, my grandma went into super-sudden labor while out and about, and this aunt of mine was halfway popping out of grandma or whatever, and my grandma passed out and fell right on her. Something like that. That was what I’d always heard. Whatever it was, this aunt of mine was just a little bit not right upstairs. Not that any of my mother’s sisters or my mother were right upstairs, they were all quite dysfunctional, but this particular aunt of mine was just a little bit slower on the draw than the others.

I had an uncle-in-law that was one of the funniest guys I ever met in my life. When he laughed, everybody laughed with him, and he was usually the joke-teller or the instigator behind whatever anybody and everybody was laughing about.

All of the dysfunctional grown-up relatives on my mom’s side used to go meet up at grandma and grandpa’s house in the summer, because grandpa had had a pool put in, and they all drank beer and smoked cigarettes and made one another laugh about grown-up stuff. In between Budweisers and PallMalls, Grandpa would do stuff like find somebody’s temporarily abandoned, newly poured glass of ice tea sitting on the kitchen counter, and he would ask the room whose it was, but before anybody could answer, he’d spit in it and say, “Mine now” and start drinking it.

But the toilet in the downstairs bathroom at Grandma and Grandpa’s was one of those wonky ones that would sometimes keep running after you flushed it, and to make it stop after you took a leak, sometimes you’d have to go back in the bathroom and jiggle the handle a bit.

It was one of those times one time, one summer we were all there, when somebody had used the downstairs bathroom and the toilet was still running in there, and my funny uncle happened to catch my slow aunt walking right by the bathroom, so he yelled over to her, would she please go in and fix it, go in and “jiggle the toilet, ” he said. Slow aunt went on in there. (And by the way, it’s not like she was RETARDED or anything. She was fully functional. She just would do bonehead, ridiculous things like what I’m about to tell you.)

Well, a little bit of time went by, and she’s still in there, and apparently my funny uncle heard some funny noises coming out of there, so he got up to check it out, what was going on, and what he found was my slow aunt with her arms all the way around the toilet bowl, trying somehow to jiggle the whole toilet to make it stop running.

As raucous as I had all the time heard my funny uncle laugh, this was the raucousest of all. He may very well have pissed his pants for all I know. It was bad. He came stumbling out of the bathroom, barely able to contain himself, desperately trying to describe to everybody what he just saw, and like funny uncle always did, he got every grown-up relative in grandpa’s whole living room to join up and laugh their asses off at my aunt. My aunt took it well; she liked the attention, in spite of it all. But then, that story joined the pantheon of other stories my funny uncle would tell every summer; damned if my funny uncle didn’t tell and retell that story for years and years, every summer we would all gather at grandma and grandpa’s house to go swimming, multiple times every summer, that was always one of my uncle’s favorite go-to stories to tell, about how he’d once told my slow aunt to “jiggle the toilet,” and then she disappeared in there, so he went in there, too, and BY GOD, SHE HAD HER ARMS AROUND THE WHOLE BOWL, AND SHE WAS JIGGLING THE TOILET, ALL RIGHT!

So if I had any advice about “jiggling the handle,” I guess my advice would be, make sure it’s just the handle, and not the whole bowl that they want jiggled. Ask questions. Get some clarity, before you go on in there.