The Full Suburban: When embarrassment runs in the family

What story do you tell when someone asks about your most embarrassing moment?

I usually share about the time I was a college intern in New York City and was doing my very best to act the part of a sophisticated city girl. One day, I got ready for work and decided to use the restroom before heading into the dorm cafeteria for breakfast. A few minutes later, after going through the line and filling up my tray with food, I was making my way through the crowded room to a table when a girl I didn’t know approached me.

“Excuse me,” she said, “but you have, um …” Her voice drifted off as she motioned to my backside.

My heart dropped to the floor as I turned around and realized that, indeed, the most striking accessory to my stylish New York City outfit was a stream of toilet paper flapping helplessly behind me. I snatched it away and wished for a swift and anonymous death. I was mortified.

Experiences like this must run in my family. My older brother, Jonathan, recently stumbled upon and shared with me an old family letter my dad wrote to his siblings and parents back in 1982, where he described an embarrassing ordeal in hilarious detail.

When my parents moved here from California in 1981, they built their dream home on a quiet cul-de-sac in the Spokane Valley. The back deck was flanked by a long bank of windows that led into our kitchen and family room, and the land behind the deck was just a field frequented by the occasional horse. Neighbors were few and far between.

The best part of the back deck was a small, enclosed “jacuzzi room” where my two brothers and I liked to do cannonballs while our parents tried to relax. Needless to say, sometimes they would wait until we went to bed and fell asleep before they would head out for a soak in the hot tub.

Late one night, they put us to bed and headed out to the spa, where they enjoyed a long soak before deciding to go back inside the house. They would usually lay a long plastic runner across the family room carpet before heading out to the jacuzzi, so wet swimsuits wouldn’t track water all over the floor when they headed back inside. But this particular night, they had forgotten to do that, and so my mom came up with an ingenious idea: they would take off their swimsuits in the jacuzzi room, dry off with the one towel they had brought with them, and then walk through the darkened living room drip-free.

They stripped down, left their suits behind, and closed the jacuzzi room door behind them before heading out into the cold March night to make the 10-foot trek past the bank of windows to the door leading into the house.

The rest of the story goes as follows, as written by my dad 40 years ago: “Just after we pulled the spa door shut (it locks automatically, by the way), Gloria gasped and said, ‘There’s someone in our house!’ Sure enough, there was our neighbor talking on our phone! We found out later that Julia woke up and couldn’t find us. She woke up Jonathan, who couldn’t find us either. He started calling the neighbors (at midnight) and finally got one to come over and check things out. The neighbor forgot about the spa, so, after looking through the house, he was getting ready to call everyone who might know where we could be. So, there we were in the cold night air on our back deck with the family room lights shining through the windows and one towel between us. Well, being chivalrous, I took the towel and went in to face our neighbor.”

( Note: My mom reports that my dad was in the house small talking while she shivered naked between the 6 inches that separated the windows and the door.)

Eventually, my dad managed to get the neighbor out of the house, him none the wiser – for a while. Apparently, it was too good of a story for my dad not to share. The next day, a different neighbor and co-worker of my dad asked my mom why the horses in the back field appeared to be smiling. The cat was out of the bag, and my mom was mortified.

See what I mean? It runs in the family.

Julia Ditto shares her life with her husband, six children and a random menagerie of farm animals in Spokane Valley. She can be reached at dittojulia@gmail.com.