We paused to catch our breath at the end of the meal, a meal that consisted of roast beef and potatoes and gravy and green beans and dinner rolls with butter and strawberry marmalade, and for dessert blueberry pie with ice cream if you wanted it (I did), and everything consumed more or less in silence and great haste, like we had a bus to catch, and the hush punctuated only by occasional utterings of More meat? or Roll please! or Beans! or Hmm and my mother’s chair scraping against the linoleum floor as she got up once and then again and then once more and finally one last time to fetch more food or serve more lemonade or clean up a spill or replace a fork that had fallen on the floor, like the one right there next to my uncle’s left boot, the uncle who smacks his lips when he eats, smacks them like he’s trying to assure himself that they aren’t really glued together, and is the only one, my uncle is, the only one at the table, or the only one in the ENTIRE FUCKING UNIVERSE for that matter, who apparently doesn’t hear the noise that his smacking lips make, a noise that you really can’t miss, a noise that pretty much drives me up the wall, the kitchen wall or any wall, that smack smack smack of his lips, and I can’t say anything because he’s my uncle and I’m just a kid, and my dad doesn’t say anything because he’s his brother and an older one at that, and my mom doesn’t say anything because he’s not her brother and besides he’s older than she is too, and so we’ve all had our fill by the time the meal is done and I suspect at least three of us are happy because my uncle’s not smacking his lips anymore and finally, finally, we can just pause and catch our breath and savor the moment, as it were.

My uncle excuses himself. I have a second piece of pie (with ice cream).

We all jumped at the sound of the bathroom door flying open, slamming against the wall and sending a few family photos to the floor, where the frames cracked and the glass splintered and the spots on the wall where they’d hung before looked oddly white and pure and out of place, just like my uncle, who came running now from the bathroom, like a late entry in a potato sack race, his pants around his ankles, shouting Holy shit! Holy shit!, with a streamer of toilet paper, still connected on one end to the roll in the bathroom and clinging to his ass on the other end, as he stumbled forward and made a lame attempt to TP the hallway of our house leading from the guest bathroom to the dining room, before finally landing, with a thud, in what I can only describe as a compromising pose, on the floor and up against our Baldwin spinet piano. A lone piece of sheet music (Beethoven’s Für Elise, if I’m not mistaken) fluttered from the stand — a deus ex machina if ever there was one — and settled atop his privates.

The sudden quiet was even more deafening than what had prevailed during our meal. (My guess is that it was because my uncle’s lips weren’t smacking now.) But of course that didn’t last long, as both my mother and my father left their chairs and rushed to tend to my uncle. I stayed at the table; I was still working on my pie with ice cream.

It seemed that the first order of business was getting his pants back up, which meant getting him back up on his feet, which meant removing the paper tail from my uncle’s behind (my dad held his foot over the trailing TP, at a respectable distance from the offending point of intersection), while keeping the first page of Beethoven’s masterpiece in place (from my seat at the table I could just make out the opening measures with the music’s distinctive melody line) and then hoisting him and his trousers, together and at the same time, to an upright position, in harmony with the lines of the upright piano. For the time being, it seemed, any residual paper would just have to stay where it was, at both ends, inside underwear and pants.

I listened, but not too closely, to what was being said over by the piano. (I had finished my pie by now and was working at dislodging bits of blueberry that were stuck in between my teeth.) Something about snakes, I think. A snake in the toilet bowl. A snake? In the toilet bowl? Are you sure? I don’t blame my parents for being incredulous. Snakes weren’t that common where we lived, at least not the dangerous kind. You had to travel a ways, to where the ground became rocky, if you wanted to find, say, rattlesnakes. At most we’d see a garter snake or two around the yard or in the garden, but they’re harmless. Still, I suppose any kind of snake, even a rubber one, would be enough to send anyone flying off the toilet seat, even with business still unfinished.

Gradually, order was restored. On the whole, I think everyone just wanted to forget the entire embarrassing scene. We never talked about it after that. It would hardly be an appropriate topic over a meal. But then we rarely talked during meals anyway. That’s just the way it was. And when my uncle joined us again for supper, we ate, as usual, more or less in silence, except for the smacking of my uncle’s lips. But I didn’t mind so much this time. The sound didn’t send me up the walls like it had before. Instead, I just smiled to myself, thought of Cecilia, my pet snake, and helped myself to a second piece of pie (with ice cream).