"It ain't my first rodeo"

For the record, these days I have no idea what my rear end looks like. At home, we've got at least one full-length mirror, but I don't know that I was ever vain or crazy enough to spin around and survey the scene. 

I was a high school jock. I've taken a thousand locker room showers with countless other wild-ass nakeds. It was impossible not to see loads of other posteriors, so I think I know what they look like--what I look like--with one exception: it's seventy years later. The lot of us, if left undraped would most certainly look. . .well, how should I say it?--forlorn, droopy maybe. 

But I've never looked in that full-length bedroom mirror, so I swear I don't know what kind of impression my own bare butt might make.

I know the bundle I carried was of considerable heft years ago, when I couldn't have won wind sprints if the other guys wore 20-pound weights on their ankles. I remember being a lousy hitter because I knew that if I swung hard I could slam a good pitch 500 feet in our fence-less ball diamond and, if I was lucky, end up on third. My butt was a burden, an embarrassment. It's true. 

But that was a thousand years ago. In college, I'll never forget being at a motel swimming pool with friends. Later, alone, this girl I was seeing told me that some of her friends told her I had cute buns.

Cute buns. That was sometime during the Paleozoic Era.

Right now, there's no chance of my checking out what's behind me. Besides, I'd rather not know.

All of which is a dirty shame because right now, living in a nursing home's rehab center as I do, I couldn't begin to count the number of women who have, already, pulled down my pants. Dozens of women of all shapes and sizes have come face-to-face with my keister. I've hosted whole gatherings in front of the toilet, but mostly it's just two or so tugging down the sweat pants one more time before I aim my butt at the throne. 

Morning comes. "Wanna change your briefs?" one says. 

Nod, and down they come, full Monty.  

Listen, it takes some moral, emotional, and spiritual adjustment for a 76-year-old Dutch Calvinist Professor of Literature to adjust to full frontal nudity before a bevy of CNAs. But they're sweet about it and quick too, which is nice. 

For my first bath--I hadn't taken a bath since the early years of this century and never, well, in public--a sweetheart named Mollie smiled when I let her know I wasn't yet at home being buck naked in her cold plastic bath chair. "Oh, get over it," she said. "This ain't my first rodeo."

I'll admit it--that helped. When I can't help but feel exposed, I tell my chilly soul, it ain't none of them's first rodeo.