A Globe and Intellectual Magazines Inside the Restroom

***Lori Summers-Chamorro

I walked inside the restroom of my favorite cafe in Encino and was delighted to see a globe  and two copies of “The New Yorker” magazine on its cabinet.

What was the owner thinking when she placed a globe inside as part of the restroom’s decor?

I could not fully wrap my mind around that globe.  I began to be obsessed with its presence as I settled on the toilet seat. Why should a restroom have a globe?  And why not?

Was it to remind whoever uses the restroom  that he is part of a bigger community?  Was it a reminder  that there are countless places for him to explore?   Was it to let the user know that the gender issue of restrooms affects the whole world? Maybe the answer is “yes”  to all these questions because  they did nudge me to think of  these things both serious and exciting.

And why a highly intellectual magazine like ” The New Yorker?” Why not “People” magazine, for instance?  Were they signs of the owner’s high regard for its clientele–that they are not too much interested in gossip but in world events, arts and culture.? Was she indirectly complimenting  his clientele’s intellectual aristocracy  with those  cerebral pieces in that restroom?

In that otherwise ordinary place,  those objects  stood out to distract me from my otherwise gross  waste elimination.  How lovely it was,  I thought,  that in a place associated with man’s waste,   I felt like I was in a library,  a favorite hangout in  my teens and young adulthood when I was still honing for life the best in me.

When I came out,  I shared with my gay close friend my musings in that restroom.

“What are you doing?  Romanticizing that place of shit?  You’re  weird.”

I argued in a friendly banter we ‘re so used to together:   “At least,  someone made an effort to make it  a lovely, intellectual place of shit.”

Then, we both laughed.  As I laughed,  I realized that in those few moments inside that “place of shit,” there was a shift from the gross to the happy.   I would have emerged from that place morose and grumpy after an olfactory assault.  But the owner’s thoughtful pieces made me ready to laugh and play.

Some people  can  magically  transform spaces–even the mundane– into places of  splendor and zen.

And with them in it,  the world is so much better.