by Barb Dyess

Created on: June 18, 2009   Last Updated: September 23, 2011

To Pee or not to Pee certainly IS the question. Or at least one of them...

Picture this, which is a true story taken from my strange and wonderful life. Some years ago, we were on a family road trip driving through Oklahoma late at night. Severe thunderstorms had wiped out all the power along that strip of highway, leaving frontage roads and motel signs unlit, which forced us to slow to a crawl to get off the interstate. But even though we could barely find our way in the gloom, we had three cranky young kids and just had to find a motel. Any motel and fast.

Pulling down a darkened lane, we passed by several darkened motels until we saw one that appeared to still be open for business. Our eldest daughter, who was about ten at the time, sat in front with her dad who was driving. I sat in back, weary from a long drive with a cranky toddler and our baby who was crying off and on. As we crept along through the parking lot to the front entrance of the place, we passed by a small cluster of male employees taking a break outside. Their white shirts gleamed blue in the dim light of one of the exit-signs. A tiny bit of moonlight illuminated the landscape. Some of them seemed to be smoking, and all were chattering away.

The unusual darkness and their stares unnerved me a little as we rumbled past in our Suburban. My husband and daughter were talking, but I was having trouble hearing them for the baby's fussing. But my older kid seemed to be saying something very strange. It sounded like "Hey Dad, those guys are European."

Looking back again in the darkness again, I was truly puzzled. "How can you tell anything in the dark?" I asked. "They look kind of Asian to me, actually. Or maybe Hispanic?"

She laughed. "No, Mom - they're European!" To which I insisted again that, no, they didn't look like it. And wondered why she kept repeating such a weird observation.

Finally, my dear husband turned in his seat and said to me, slowly, clearly, and precisely, "She said 'they are PEE-ING!"

Looking again, I saw that sure enough, some of the men stood with their fronts to a retaining wall in a familiar position. Right there in public, in a darkened parking lot in civilized America, apparently thinking they were 'covered' by the power outage, that's what the men were doing. It's a classic family story we tell to this day that we still fondly refer to as "The European Story."

Europee-ans, indeed!

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