Junior kindergarten it was called then. Now it’s called pre-kindergarten or four-year-old preschool. Now it’s playing on jungle gyms and learning abc’s, but ours had nightly homework, a drill book of homonyms and rhyming words and speed tests, a navy blue book called Victory Drill, the victory being in Christ through whom all things are made possible.

Nap-time, though, we had. Now they have tumbling mats, but we brought beach towels. Mine was a Star Wars beach towel, C-3PO and R2-D2 my sleep companions. Every day, the same instruction from Miss Doty, our teacher: “You don’t have to sleep, but you can’t get up. Don’t rise from your towel. Don’t talk to your neighbor. Don’t visit my desk. Nap time is a time for rest.”

This day I remember, I don’t know if it was toward the beginning or the end of the school year. I don’t even know much about the school year or about being four years old. This is my only memory of being four years old. What I do remember is that I needed to get up and use the bathroom, that I knew I was not allowed to get up, that logic therefore dictated that all I could do was stay on my towel and hold it as long as I could.

Number two, the teacher called it. Poop, we called it. Crap we could not call it, and now we know that the third grade teacher, Mrs. Vanderlip, was fired for using this word, crap. Shit was a word we did not yet know, and too bad, because this is the word that would be the right word for what now was coming out of me, because I could no longer hold it inside of me.

What I mean to describe is the most memorable bowel movement of my life, and the way I remember it, this thing seemed to be happening elsewhere. I was somehow an external observer of this thing that was happening. Coming out, the shit seemed quite solid. It also had a definitive texture to it. Long and firm and narrow, but with spikes protruding at regular intervals. Coming out of my bottom—not my butt, ass, or anus, for these words would likely also have resulted in the firing of Mrs. Vanderlip—this thing did seem solid. It did not worry me. When nap time was over and the lights came on, I would just go to the bathroom and dump it into the stall toilet and forget about it.

The lights came on. We were marched to the bathroom. I went into the stall and took down my pants, but when I tried to dump the log, I found it was not a solid as I had imagined. It smeared. Everything was smeared. My pants, my underwear, my legs, the toilet, somehow the walls of the stall, somehow the toilet seat, certainly my hands.

Time passed. How much I do not know. The toilet paper in my hands, I tried to clean things. Sometimes in those days I assigned colors to numbers—white to one, yellow to two, orange to three, green to four, red to five, blue to six, brown to seven and nine, black to eight and zero. I remember worrying why there was no number for purple. I remember adding numbers to see what color they might become when paired with another number.

All of this must have taken some time. The teacher knocked at the stall. The teacher eventually came into the stall. I do not remember what it looked like but I can imagine her horror at what she saw. I can imagine the defecation all over the walls. The words fail here. It is not serious to write or speak of shit or crap or poop, and the word defecation seems too elevated, yet isn’t this what we each of us traffic in, and daily? Isn’t this the kind of failure that bookends our lives, this failure of control, to poop we are born and to poop we shall return before we die? Even in the words there is indignity, and what does this say about life?

In this spirit of indignity, Miss Doty did not try to clean me. She did not much touch me so much as I can tell. Instead, she pulled my pants to my knees and marched me that way, legs shuffling as though ankle-shackled, legs shit-smeared, tiny penis flopping exposed with each step, past the crowd of classmates washing their hands in the bathroom sink, past the lines of pointing kindergartners and first graders in the hallway of the primary building, past the maintenance men tending the sidewalks and politely averting their eyes, past the fifth graders at the water fountain outside the nurse’s station, who began to point and laugh and cheer and say words I cannot remember except their mock and the sting of it.

This evening it is twenty-nine years later, and a child in my own house has pooped his pants. In the years intervening, I have helped clean my grandfather’s soiled underpants after a triple-bypass surgery, and I have changed the diapers of children, and I have crawled into the bed of a male friend dying of leukemia and come away with his shit on my own pants, and the next day after he had died, I washed the shit from the leg of my pants. I wonder did Miss Doty want me to feel the shame of that long walk that I certainly did feel and still feel and still remember twenty-nine years later, and what did that shame mean, and what does that shame mean, and if it is so shameful, aren’t we all now implicated, all we who have ever shit ourselves and all we who will ever die, and why is there no number for the color purple, and why are we so frail? In the bathroom, my wife wipes my child’s bottom with a wet rag and rinses the soiled clothes in the toilet water and throws them in the washing machine and draws a bath and sings softly a song, and still the house is filled with the smell of shit, and I cannot bring myself to help her, and I feel ashamed.