She stank. Oh yeah, she did
SATURDAY, August 7 – The boys are curious about the sort of things I’ve written in my diary. Almost every morning during this vacation I’ve set the alarm for five o’clock so I can type out the notes I took during the first few months and rework the text. I give them the month of November.
While I continue with the month of January, Sander reads the first few weeks. We’re lying on our hotel bed. He keeps laughing out loud. He finds the passage recorded on November 7th hilarious – the one when we invented the ‘taking-a-shit theory’. He’s somewhat amazed that I dared to write that down since even just the word ‘shit’ is pretty daring. After the first sentence containing the F word, he knows what to expect. We call this artistic freedom of speech.
Eamonn joins in the laughter. He’s playing a game on the computer, but he’s also listening to Sander’s comments on my diary entries during those first few weeks.
‘I’d already forgotten a lot of things,’ says Sander. The shit theory was one of them. ‘And what just occurred to me,’ he adds, ‘but don’t write this down is that Mom always stank after she pooped.’
Eamonn giggles. ‘Yeah, she did.’
I write this down and read the passage out loud.
‘Oh, no,’ Sander says. ‘I told you not to write that down!’
Eamonn laughs even harder and I join in. In the end, so does Sander. He throws a pillow at my head. I dodge it. He returns to reading my diary and I go on typing undisturbed.
Diary of a Widower 