JOURNAL EXCERPT: April 24, Mon. 1978 8:55 PM

"I just have had an argument with the parents. They want me to go buy some toilet paper. Dad came into my room and said, 'I want you to go buy some toilet paper. We're out,' and handed me two dollars.

"'Now?' I asked.

"'Yes.'

"'But Mom just went to the store today. Why didn't she get some then?'

"'She forgot. And pull your car in behind your mother's when you come back. Don't leave it out in the street.'

"He left and I started thinking. Going in the store and just buying a package of toilet paper would look pretty ridiculous. I wasn't going to go buy toilet paper. Someone else could do it.

"I went to the living room and said to Mom, 'I'm not gonna go get toilet paper. M-- [my younger sister who was 14 at the time] can go in and get it.'

"'I'm not gonna get it,' M-- said.

"'Why don't you get it. You're the one that forgot it,' I said to Mom. She didn't answer.

"Mom knocked on my door a little later. 'Are you going to go get the toilet paper?'

"'No.'

"She stormed into her and Dad's room. 'I told you he wouldn't go and get it,' she yelled.

"I knew Dad would be at my door in a minute. Sure enough.

"'Are you going to go get the toilet paper?'

"'Dad, if it was anything else but toilet paper and so late at night.'

"'Oh, come on. I've went and gotten toilet paper many times. It's no big deal. Everyone uses it.'

"'When did you just go get toilet paper?'

"'Lots of times.' He went back to his room.

"I went out in the hall. 'If she'd start writing a list when she goes to the store, she wouldn't forget things like toilet paper.' I was ignored. 'It's not like we need it right away.'

"'We're out,' Dad said.

"'We've got some left.' I got some out of our bathroom and showed him about one-fourth of a roll.

"'That won't last the night,' he said.

"'I've got dirty hair. I'll have to go with dirty hair,' I said. No one listened.

I found my mother in the living room. 'You're the one that forgot it.'

'''Start acting your age,' she said. I thought I was. I guess I didn't know acting your age included going down to the store at eight-thirty pm to buy a package of toilet paper. I went back to my room.

"As Mom was walking past my room to her room, she said, 'Next time he needs anything, he can just forget about any help from us.' That means that if my car breaks down somewhere, I can neither depend on them for a ride, or ask them to help me work on the car, or ask for a loan. And all because of a roll of toilet paper.

"'No one else'll go get it either,' I said from my room. There was no answer."

MANHOOD REDO: This is another one of those embarrassing journal entries that I would have preferred to skip over but include because I suppose I can convince myself it's occasionally a good thing to be humbled by my younger self. I remembered this incident before reading it in the canary yellow legal pad, so it has some sort of lasting relevance. I can recall at the time how incensed I was and how I felt absolutely right in my decision not to go buy the toilet paper; I clearly wrote the entry in a way that indicates this. There's no doubt or uncertainty - only outrage and frustration. I felt I was being singled out as the oldest. No one else wanted to go to the store either, something I kept pointing out, to no effect.

Upon reading the entry now, one of the things that strikes me is my sense of masculine entitlement, especially towards my mother. I'm troubled that I felt I could say what I did, especially, "Why don't you go get it. You're the one who forgot it," and "If she'd start writing a list when she goes to the store, she wouldn't forget things like toilet paper." I'm apologizing now for this. Like many young males, I don't think I had much of a sense of all her responsibilities and probably took her work for granted. She never had a job outside the home while I was growing up, so in that sense she could easily be typecast as a woman of the 1950s, and yet she was never the Mrs. Cleaver type. Her own mother, my grandmother, wanted her to be the perfect little girl, but I suppose she rebeled against that in various ways all her life.

It also seems like I was also trying to align myself with my father against her. If I could just get him to see that she was being irrational, that she had failed in her responsibilities, then I wouldn't have to go get the toilet paper. Of course, he didn't cooperate.

What I can't remember and explain is exactly why the prospect of going to buy toilet paper at 8:30 pm that night was so uncomfortable. What did I think would happen? That a checker would see the toilet paper and consider me foul? That I would somehow become marked as unclean? What was going through my head?

Whatever it was, it seems to have disappeared. Thirty years later I'm known in some circles (those my wife tells the story in) as the guy who went to the store to buy condoms and cat litter.