Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Aug. 20, 2012

Left behind

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I have lost something very dear to me. And when I say “lost,” I’m not talking about the kind of temporary loss where you misplace something and eventually find it, and say “Aha, there it is! I should have looked there in the first place.” No, I’m talking about a more permanent kind of loss, like the passing of a close friend or relative, and the stark realization that he is gone, and is never coming back. Like when a woman explains, ruefully, that she lost her husband last year. We all know that she doesn’t mean he wandered off at Walmart and she hasn’t seen him since. No, he has permanently gone to that glorious discount store in the sky, where there’s only one greeter, St. Peter.

Well, like a lot of men my age, I have lost my butt. And it is not wandering around Walmart somewhere, either. It is permanently gone. And I miss it.

When I was younger, I had an excellent butt. It wasn’t up there in the Jennifer Lopez/Michelle Obama butt category, but for a guy it was very serviceable. It was plump and well-cushioned, and when I walked into a room I could hold my butt up high with pride. I could sit on a hard wooden bleacher, or a metal folding chair, or even a fence rail, for two hours with that butt, and be none the worse for wear. And when I stood up I never had to worry about my pants falling down, because I had that splendid butt there to stop their downward descent.

But all of that is behind me now. Or maybe I should say not behind me. Now, when I walk into a room, I no longer strut proudly, buttocks bouncing. Now I slink furtively into that room and quickly look around for something soft and comfortable–a pillow or a cushion or a cat–to rest what used to be my butt on. And when I get up I always have to hitch up my pants in the back before they drop to new lows. Oh sure, I know I should wear my pants up higher, but I can’t. I can’t because God has not only taken away that fine, cushioned butt just when I it most, he has also displayed his remarkable sense of humor by giving me a layer of fat large enough for three people to sit on, but positioned it where my finely toned abdomen used to be. And yes, I say that God did it, not me, because I eat even less today than I did fifteen or twenty years ago, and still the belly grows while the caboose shrinks.

There are some folks who would argue that I haven’t lost my butt. “It’s just been repositioned to the front,” they say. They would argue that God seldom takes away a major human body part entirely, only relocates it. This theory holds that while God may well make men grow balder as they grow older, that loss is only on the top of their heads. The missing head hair can be found growing in vast profusion out of ears and eyebrows and nostrils. Take the late Andy Rooney, for example. With all due respect, even if he did lose most of the hair on the top of his head before he died, I’d bet the old goat still had enough eyebrow and ear hair left to knit three angora sweaters. And while older folks do indeed tend to lose teeth, they aren’t really lost. All that missing tooth enamel can be found in their toenails, which now grow into hooves, thick and strong enough to require a sanding disk attached to a dental drill to trim them. “Nothing is ever lost,” the eternal optimists say. “Look around, and you’ll find it, just in a new location.”

That may seem logical to those folks, but my butt is definitely lost. Gone. I’m not sure where butts like mine go, but I would suspect that when left to themselves, unrestrained butts without bodies could wreak havoc on civilization. That is why when I read a July 17, 2012 headline on South Bend, Indiana’s WNDU website, I was sure I was onto something. A clue, perhaps, in the great disappearing butts mystery. And more specifically, a hint as to what happened to mine.


“Butts to blame for 30 grass fires”


That’s exactly what it said. But when I read the article, I learned the headline only referred to cigarette butts, not the human kind. “Half of all field and grass fires in unincorporated St. Joseph County this summer were most probably caused by discarded smoking materials.”

So there we are, right back where we started. My butt is gone, and there’s no remedy for it. Oh sure, there is a specific kind of plastic surgery, called a “Brazilian Butt Augmentation” or Gluteoplasty, where doctors take fat from one body part and put it in the buttock area. That sounded reasonable to me, but Dr. Constantino Mendieta, who performs this kind of surgery in Miami, seemed mainly concerned with women’s butts. And while some of the buttocks in his photos, which the ad describes as “round, curvy and spectacular,” were quite nice, it was obvious that they all had something there to start with. They had not lost their butts completely, and since they weren’t men, they were in no danger of doing so. Take a look at Aunt Mildred, who even at 80 has more than ample material back there to sculpt a whole crate full of jumbo-sized buttocks, and then look at poor old scrawny, buttless Uncle Bud, whose entire rear end left him without a word of warning back during the Nixon Administration.

I could go on, but I’ve already been sitting at this stupid keyboard, on this lumpy old office chair, for way longer than even somebody with a “round, curvy and spectacular” butt should sit. My tailbone is killing me.

I quit.