The Baboon Congress

Peeing in the Gladstone Cemetery

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Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota

My husband occupied the office next to mine for 10 years. It was nice to be so close and to have someone to talk to. I hit the jackpot, though, when they moved my coworker, Janelle, into husband’s office after he retired. She is a Developmental Disabilities Program Manager and is a few years younger than I am. Our children are about the same ages. Her job involves making certain that people with developmental disabilities get the services they need, and that their service providers get paid. She is a local, and grew up with six older brothers on a farm between Gladstone and Lefor, both pretty small communities about 10 miles from Dickinson noted for their German-Russian and German-Hungarian settlers. She has a very loud giggle, and she giggles and laughs most of the time. She is very energetic, despite having MS and a heart condition. I believe she has ADHD. She is also one of the funniest and most irreverent and foul mouthed persons I know. Everyone in her family calls her Toots.

Janelle has a way of noticing the comic and absurd all around her and is a great story teller. She is also very good at imitating the German patois of her neighbors and older relatives  (“Ya, that Jakey Frank died. He just woke up dead one morning”.)   Her mother (aka Crabby Lavonne) is in the nursing home, and the other day she was visiting her mom when her Aunt Rose, also a resident, came charging down the hallway, waving her cane around. Aunt Rose exclaimed “I am DEEsgusted”. “Why Aunt Rose, what is the matter?” “Dos dem kids anyway (the PT’s and OT’s). They eggspect me to jump around. I am too olt for dat!” Janelle then asked her aunt if she wanted to sit down. Janelle’s mom then piped in and said to her “You dumb ass! Don’t you know that when Rose is DEEsgustetd she doesn’t want any help”.

A few days ago Janelle and her husband were driving around out in the country near Gladstone looking at some land to buy, when she found that she had to pee. She asked her husband to drive up a fairly deserted road to a place she knew where she could relieve herself and no one could see. To her dismay, she found that someone had put a mobile home up on the very spot, They were near the Catholic Cemetery, so she asked her husband to drive there. She did her business, and walked the dog around and visited all the family graves, leaving only two small tissues as evidence for what she had done.

Later that night, someone went to the cemetery and vandalized head stones with hammers and knocked over other head stones. Janelle was both horrified and delighted, horrified at the damage and delighted  by the fact that she had left tons of DNA for the police to find and pin the vandalism on her. She is friends with several police officers and I am sure they are all going to hear her “confession”. I told her I would start baking pans of Scotcheroos to sell to raise money to bail her out of jail..

Janelle is a day brightener for me. I just wish I could convey better her essence, her bounce, and her liveliness.

What happened when you couldn’t hold it any longer?

63 thoughts on “Peeing in the Gladstone Cemetery”

  1. In one memorable (and embarrassing) moment, the result was that the church janitor had a cleanup job and I spent some very horrified time by myself waiting for my dad to bring me fresh clothes. The backstory was that it was the morning of the church choir cantata and I was to sing the titular role at the second of our church’s three services (Joseph of Technicolor Dreamcoat fame – it started as a short cantata for children’s choir). First service, my pal Todd, the other Joseph, started his entrance solo and, well…between not “going” before the service and my nervousness for my turn 90 minutes later…yeah. I was glad I was standing a little behind the lectern and a low bit of wall (and that I was wearing a choir robe). My performance went fine – Dad saved the day with fresh clothes. And, most miraculously, none of my fellow choir members teased me about it (at least when I was within ear shot).

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  2. Rise and P? Baboons!

    What a hoot! I knew this one would be good. Renee–you must post the recipe for Scotcheroos if you are selling them for bail money.

    Our family roamed NW Iowa, SW Minnesota, NE Nebraska, and SE S. Dakota with Uncle Jim who loved to travel. He was always ready for a day trip hiking and playing in water or woods. Dad’s wheelchair did not intimidate him.

    On these trips with six kids and three other adults, somebody always had to go. He would line us up in the ditch of whatever road we were on, shielded by the car, and order us to pee. My brother, who had the proper body part, would get to use dad’s urinal as needed in the car, but he also loved to pee in the ditch. (As a kindergartner he challenged Uncle Jim to a sword fight, a memory which still reduces Uncle Jim to helpless laughter).

    Most of our day trip destinations had outhouses. However, those lacked the camaraderie of a public ditch.

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  3. It just didn’t seem right to burst into the occupied men’s room, so I used the unoccupied women’s room.
    OT. For Renee
    Is that old Gladstone school still standing? Years ago I carpeted the gym. The basketball layout was so small that the large center circle intersected with the free throw lane circles. From the balcony it looked like the seams in a baseball.

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    1. How funny, wessew! Yes the school is still standing, I think, and I believe it has been converted into a family home. All the children from Gladstone now go to school in Dickinson.

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        3. To Linda. Not as much anymore but for a while elementary and secondary schools went that route. I personally did work in 50-60 schools in North Dakota and Minnesota that used carpet in their gyms and dinning areas.

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  4. A friend of mine was arrested as a teenager for indecent exposure. She was taking a whizz behind some shrubbery in a public park. (The park has facilities, but they were locked.) There was alcohol involved, but the others in her party scattered when the cops arrived, taking the evidence with them. My friend’s mother came down to the police station and was more peeved with the cops than with her daughter.

    Fortunately this happened decades before you could look up someone’s arrest record online.

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  5. Tangential post-
    You have just made me aware, Renee, that all of the native speakers of Gott Damm Ting deutsch in my family are gone.

    We were raised very fastidiously, I have no emergency stop stories.

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    1. my dad was from fargo and the norweighen and the swedes were everywhere. he did a great yob uf tllin about does sveedes and dem norveegans. you can hear it cant you? i heard lots of stories wit da verts chanjed yust a little bit/

      dog gone it. it took me 25 years to learn to say yelly and den they changed it to yam.

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  9. My father always said he wanted to live where he could piss off the back porch, which was true of where I grew up.
    Today I am a 7–year-old man whose bladder likes frequent off-loads. I plan my liquid consumption carefully.

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    2. that was one of the two criterias i had when i bought my first house. tht you could pee in the back yard and that there was a spot for a horseshoe pit.
      it was amazing how many places got ruled out because they failed one or the other.
      i dont play much horseshoes but its not a bad rule. if there is no place that will accommodate it it really needs to be looked at.

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  10. Hi–
    Busy week for me at the college (100th anniversary of RCTC requiring special lighting of course!)

    Many years ago we were at at local electronics retailer having the latest of several ‘go-rounds’ with the customer service desk. Kelly had our daughter sitting on the counter while arguing– I mean ‘disagreeing’ –with the help there.
    When we finally left in a huff and Kelly picked up daughter, there was a wet spot on the counter.
    Fine. Let that serve to show our displeasure with your service.

    Apologies to whomever followed us there.

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  11. When I was about ten I left home on my bicycle to pick up the papers for my paper route. I counted out the papers, then folded each of them so I could throw them. I was bent double with a throbbing bladder before I even started the route. My home was at the halfway point, so I determined to hold it until I got that far. Otherwise I’d have to run home, then loop back down to the southern end of my route and resume going north, backtracking myself.

    “Holding it” became more distressing with each passing second. I pedaled faster, throwing my papers at front doors with desperation. Pretty soon I was pedaling and throwing furiously, my face screwed up with agony. And then the inevitable happened: the sight of my home triggered a flow of hot liquid. I had to limp in my front door, my pants a fragrant mess, just to change into dry clothes.

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  12. I was probably 7 or 8 and I was at my best friend’s house, playing out in the snow. I was not allowed in her house that day because her sister had the flu or something. I realized that I really had to go but, because our houses weren’t too close together, I couldn’t make it home in time. So I just went. I don’t think those snow boots were salvageable.

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  13. Renee, in Clarks Grove, where I once lived, there was a character who I heard about called Old Hoha, because he often used that exclamation. I think that he is the one I was told about who had to be carefully watched at the hardware store because he would back up to tubs of nails or other items and fill his pockets when no one was looking. This guy was a Dane. I was reminded of him by your descriptions of small town Germans.

    Men and boys usually can find some out of the way spot to pee in an emergency due to their ability to pee standing up. This lets them handle sudden urges to pee without too much difficulty. Some young boys seem to like to show off their peeing skills right out in the open. I was walking with a young neighbor boy who told me he was going give me a demonstration of his peeing skills. I was able to get him to agree to hold off until he got to his house. I knew he would pee out in the open because he had done that in our back yard several time.

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  14. In the second year of my marriage, my erstwife and I joined a buddy who wanted to introduce us to grouse hunting. We drove to northern Minnesota, then hiked a mile through the midnight woods to a little trailer where we’d sleep the night. We had a great picnic dinner that night, a meal made greater by a lot of tawny port. Then we were chased into the trailer for the night by an energetic thunderstorm. Lightning struck nearby trees while rain drummed on the trailer roof.

    I woke up in the night because the port I’d consumed was insisting on coming out. The rain hammered furiously like we were trapped in a carwash. I was able to stand at the door and whizz outside. Soon I was back in my sleeping bag feeling giddy with relief when my erstwife began stirring. When we hit a lull in the monsoon, she scampered outside. She was still out there when the skies erupted again, hurling rain down on us with tropical fury. I never in my life was so pleased to be a guy.

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  15. I was bullied when I started kindergarten. Some older girls picked on me, usually cornering me in the bathroom. In logical 5-year old fashion I solved the problem by not going into the bathroom. Of course, that backfired when I couldn’t hold it in the classroom. The teacher was really confused when I wouldn’t get up from my desk at the end of the day.

    The really good part about this is that the day after my accident, when the bullying came to light, my folks put the house up for sale (we’d only lived for a couple of months at that point) and we moved to a new house/district just a couple of weeks later. Boy if that doesn’t make you feel loved and valued!

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  16. Related story. When Young Adult and I went on vacation to Colorado this summer, we had the inevitable “I have to go” moments. On one of these occasions it was quite a few miles before we found an exit w/ a gas station. I told Young Adult that when I was a kid on road trips, my folks would pull over to the side of the road and my sister and I would have to do our business in whatever tall grasses/weeds were roadside. Young Adult was appalled and suggested she could wait until hell froze over before she would pee alongside the highway!

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  17. Great blog, Renee — she sounds like a wonderful character. I remember one time when I was in middle school, I think. I was at the gym of the church we attended, waiting while my dad was setting up a sound system for an event. The boy I had a major crush on was also hanging around for some reason (I think his dad was setting up something as well). I was trying to show off and get attention by playing basketball and throwing baskets (my style of flirting — didn’t work well), but I also really had to pee. I didn’t want to leave his presence while he was in the vicinity, but of course, never actually talked to him.

    Eventually, the inevitable happened and I had to take refuge in the bathroom and stuff my pants with toilet paper to soak up the mess. It wasn’t the full load, but enough.

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  18. When my brother and I made the 2600-mile trek out to Portland, I already knew that his diuretic meant frequent stops. On the freeway to Portland, you could drive 50 miles before a gas station exit, and the land was mostly wide open plains with no vegetation for cover. In planning the trip, we both agreed that he could just suspend the medication for the duration of this trip because, as he said, we’d have to stop every 10 minutes, adding another day to the travel time.

    This unfortunate decision landed him in the hospital two days later with life-threatening conditions. I’ve felt guilty about my part ever since.

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  19. Well Dear Baboons, the wretched car has been pronounced dead.

    I’ll either have a lot to say about this experience or be completely shut down by it.

    I confess, beyond beautiful vintage cars, I’m just not interested in them and would cheerfully live without one, but as it is not just me…..

    And why do the aesthetics around the whole automotive thing have to be so ugly?

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    1. You have my sympathies. I bought my Beetle because it at least had a little panache and personality – most options on the road are either the sedan-shaped box, a larger SUV-shaped box, or the somewhere-between-a-hatchback-and-station-wagon thing. When the Beetle receives its last rites, I’m not sure what I will do (especially since I can’t afford a Tesla).

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        1. i think an old volvo 850 or v 70 is a good consideration. i particularly like the 850 for economic ongoing reasons. find one with 100,000 miles and it should be 1500 and is a good value

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    2. I am so seriously not into cars. Yesterday I came out of Office Max and there were 2 red cars sitting approximately where I remember parking. I had to look inside both of them to see which was mine! This is a big problem for Young Adult, who knows every car ever made and cares deeply about what she drives.

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      1. When I drove a white Saturn, I almost got into the wrong one once at a mall. What was disconcerting was that my key fit in their lock. It wasn’t until I reached to open the door that I realized the stuff in the back seat was not mine. Yikes!

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      2. 1959. Sandy and friend waiting for her boy friend to pick them up off the curb. As her boyfriends car pulls up, she pops a garter. She gets into front seat and lifts up skirt to fix garter. Sandy is trying to tell her it’s the wrong car.

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  20. Daughter was horrified and deeply offended when we received the letter from State Farm last week that they were cancelling the insurance on the car she drives, as a result of her totalling her former car in April. Our agent advised her to get her own policy with a Farmer’s insurance agent he knew in Moorhead. Well, after some tears, and wailing that she didn’t even know what a deductible was and what sort of coverage she could get, she marched over to the office, got her own policy, and tersely told me to cancel her State Farm renters insurance since she now had different renters insurance with Farmers that reduced the cost of her car insurance. Now she knows all about insurance, and I hope it makes her a more careful driver.

    in an ironic twist of fate, the next day her father mashed up the bumper on his pickup, his second accident in four months. Our agent assures us they won’t cancel the insurance on the pickup.

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  21. i read most of the above stories before i was reminded of my offering.
    i am a bob dylan fan. bob sells tickets in seats and also on the main floor of a place like the excel center. instead of lining up the chairs you just stand there. it takes a while for bob to get up there and i think one time bob weir of the grateful deal was the warm up act, anyway it takes a couple hours if you want to get a ggod spot to make it all the way through to bob;s performance. well there is beer involved. a coule thne a couple more and by the time bob is there you are drinking out of a stack of 3 or 4 beer cups stacked inside each other. i may have been a littel buzzed because it seemed to me to be perfecty logical to simply fil the beer cups with out go instead of the incoming that had been started just a short time before. when you hold it a while it fills the first beer vcup real fast. set it down on the floor discreetly and the second could be the end of it but if i remember correctly there was a third involved. i sure felt better and by the time the concert was over the ebb and flow of the traffic on the standing room only floor had left me in the same general vicinity but not anywhere where i could put my eyes on them.

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  22. Back to peeing…….over the years I have made emergency pit stops behind bushes, in ditches, etc. The coolest one was more recently. While on safari in the Serengeti watching part of the Wildebeest migration, my friend Diane and I asked our guide how close we were to facilities. He explained that it would take at least an hour to reach the visitor center and that would cut in to our viewing time. His solution was to wait until the Wildebeest were out of sight and the other safari jeeps had departed (which fortunately was not long). He made sure no other wildlife was nearby and had both of us go behind the jeep to pee. So we marked our own little territory in the Serengeti.

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  24. I was in England on a college seminar and we were in this old country pub and I had a pint and the bathrooms appeared to be places you could contract dengue fever so we walked the mile or two on a country road to the place we were staying and I had to pee and I absolutely couldn’t hold it but it was dark and pouring rain and no one could tell and my jeans got washed out by the rain.

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  25. i was in a car on the back roads of china with a driver taking us to the factory and i had had my 23 cups of tea before we left so we were an hour into the trip and i told the driver i need to make a stop. another 10 minutes later i reminded him i needed to stop he looked at me and kept dirving. i opened the door and then he got the idea. pull over here and i will be back in a minute. he tried to explain that the nearest toilet was another 20 or 30 miles and i peed while he was telling me and explained it didnt matter any more. he was able to drive to our destnation unimpeded form that point on.

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  26. Hey Baboons!

    The post today is only available through email posts–the website is not bringing it up. It must be one of those “forgot to check the box” things.

    If you scroll to the top of this post the topic for today is “So fine a Saddle” by Cynthia in Mahtowa. 🙂

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  28. Only one time in my whole life did I truly “lose it”. To this day, I’m proud of that. Our retire neighbors were so obsessed with a perfect lawn that they cut crabgrass out with fingernail scissors. They were completely intolerant of neighboring children or even a paper airplane landing in their yard.

    On early morning, we heard loud sounds against our aluminum siding. I went out to find these old geezers tossing rocks at our house. I asked why they were doing this and they said, “Look at your tree!! It’s leaning over our garage!!! Why haven’t you done anything about it??!!”

    Well, the tree went down in the middle of the night. Their attack on our house happened before most people even got up. I told them that this was “An act of God” to which they insisted that it wasn’t and that we should’ve taken care of it by now.

    This put me over the line and I began swearing at them and telling them how much everyone hated them. I went on and on about what wretched people they were. I even used the F bomb. They stood there stunned by the overflow of my years of indignation, then I came into my house smiling. Never before and never again have I gone off with no filter whatsoever.

    So many times people have deserved such an attack, but I don’t have the courage to launch one.

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  29. My story begins on a trip from California to Texas. We were moving and my husband was driving the moving van and I was following in the car with my darling cockatoo dog. It became uncomfortably clear that I needed to go, so I radioed him that I had to stop…NOW. I pulled over, jumped out of the car , made it about 30 feet, dropped my drawers and felt the relief that only comes when one’s bowels are emptied. I dug a couple of Kleenex out of my jean pocket. Cleaned myself up as good as I could, turned to go back to the car and looked down to see that I had s**t all over my beautiful dog’s face. Her curiosity had brought her too close to my backside. To make matters worse, my husband wouldn’t let her ride in the van with him. Now how tacky was that?

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