Hoity toity

This is a whole passage and a half from the latest Bill Bryson I read. Never found BB to have outright guffaw factor but this is the best one from the selection I've read so far. Umpteen amusement. And pay special attention to the Dad's reaction...ha..

Under the sink, my mother kept an enormous selection of jars, including one known as the toity jar. 'Toity' in our house was the term for a pee, and throughout my early years the toity jar was called into service whenever a need to leave the house inconveniently coincided with a sudden need by someone - and when I say 'someone', I mean of course the youngest child: me - to pee...I suppose I guessed that the toity jar was routinely discarded and replaced with a fresh jar - we had hundreds after all.

So you can imagine my consternation, succeeded by varying degrees if dismay, when I went to the fridge one evening for a second helping of halved peaches and realized that we were all eating from a jar that had, only days before, held my urine. I recognized the jar at once because it had a Z-shaped strip of label adhering to it...Now here it was holding our dessert peaches. I couldn't have been more surprised...

'Mom', I said, coming to the dining room doorway and holding up my find, 'this is the toity jar'. 'No honey' she replied smoothily without looking up...'Whats the toity jar?' asked my father with an amused air, spooning peach into his mouth. 'Its the jar I toity in', I explained. 'And this is it'.

'Billy toities in a jar?' said my father, with very slight difficulty, as he was no longer eating the peach half he had just taken in, but resting it on his tongue pending receipt of further information concerning its recent history.

'Just occassionally', my mother said. My father's mystification was now nearly total, but his mouth was so full of unswallowed peach juice that he could not meaningfully speak. He asked, I believe, why I didn't just go upstairs to the bathroom like a normal person. It was a fair question under the circumstances.

'Well, sometimes we are in a hurry', my mother went on a touch uncomfortably. 'So I keep a jar under the sink - a special jar'.

I reappeared from the fridge, cradling more jars - as many as I could carry. 'I'm pretty sure I've used all these too', I announced.

'That can't be right', my mother said, but there was a kind of question mark hanging off the edge of it. Then she added, perhaps a touch self-destructively. 'Anyway, I always rinse all jars thoroughly before reuse'.

My father rose and walked to the kitchen, inclined over the waste bin and allowed the peach half to fall into it..'Perhaps a toity jar's not such a good idea', he suggested.

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