The other day, maybe just yesterday, but time exists on such a weird continuum for me at the moment, I was working in the bookstore. It was a quiet moment, so I had ducked behind one of the shelves and was happily reading an essay out of David Sedaris' When You Are Engulfed in Flames, when I heard a very loud and utterly disembodied burst of flatulence. I have not heard a fart of such volume and trumpet-like proportions since the days I spent every other moment with Cliff and the Lewis twins when they were eleven and did such things on purpose.
I half-expected Rodney Dangerfield to materialize in front of our row of Touch-and-Feel books and say "Hey hey, did somebody step on a duck?"
"Wasn't me!" the Kindergartner inside of me wanted to yelp.
But the funny thing about being a grown-up is that you can fart as much as you want and no one's allowed to make fun of you. At least not to your face. At what age, exactly, does that shift happen?
I identified the culprit lurking in the shadows of the "Native American" section, buried guiltily in Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha, which you know he only picked up to look like he was too busy reading to be the responsible party. Or to pretend he wasn't really more interested in the "Contemporary Teen Series" shelf directly under it that contains Twilight, and Gossip Girl.
I wonder just how much of a breach of customer-service etiquette it would have been to squeal "EEEEWWWW that man FARTED!"
Carol would've probably run me out on a pole.
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