Four minutes to read.
“This must be the shittiest place in Prague,” I whispered. “Why are you whispering?” my wife whispered back. We were the only ones in the Museum of Historical Chamber Pots and Toilets.
I was whispering because talking openly about human waste disposal is not something I normally do. A conversational taboo. Like revealing low self-esteem. Hi, I’m Noah. I have negative feelings about myself. Hi, I’m Noah, and I’m constipated.
At my wife’s urging, I am in Prague to exchange a sweet memory for a shitty one. I was recently fired. I’m unemployed.
Even you can’t possibly fail at travel, she teased. A thoroughly miserable holiday, she argued, is still replete with vibrant smells, vibrating sounds, culture and people, soaring architecture, splashy colors, majestic skylines, exotic foods.
The ‘toilet’ museum displays 2,700 chamber pots, toilet chests, bathroom chairs, commodes, bed pans, slop jars, coach toilets and decorated ceramic toilets dating from the 15th century. The notable ones include chamber pots made for Napoleon Bonaparte, Abraham Lincoln's White House bedroom, the Titanic, the Chinese Emperor Quianlong, plus toilets used in space travel, bourdaloues and caganers.
There are old-timey water closets and fancy bidets to check out. New-fangled toilets to flush. If the sanitation industry evolved and moved on, maybe I can. That’s what my wife thinks. I think shit is shit—and a failed career is the worst kind of shit.
I loved my job. I loved looking at my business card: Assistant Urban Planner, City and County of San Francisco.
Without a job title, I am a Kafkaesque man. An outcast without an identity. Ignored, unremarked, unremembered. Forgotten and forgettable. Shivered by this insight, a bit of vomit gags the back of my throat.
The museum’s scent is like a bank of sanitized toilet bowls in an airport restroom. With my career in the toilet, maybe I need a cleanse too—maybe a new profession.
Outside, the Prague light is starting to fade, streetlamps beginning to shine. Shadows creep across the damp, dark streets. Trees turn from green to black. In the distance, the Vitava River washes through the city. It’s as if the night is offering to hide me from myself.
I watch a city trolley gliding like an ocean liner on tracks through the cold night. It trundles to a silent stop, spits out passengers, swallows new ones. People with purpose to their lives, their loves.
In Old Town Prague, standing in a plaza across from a concert hall, Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 "From the New World” bathes me with sound. My wife’s warm arm intertwines with mine.
Dvorak wrote and rewrote his music. Kafka burned 90% of his work, never finished his novels. On Prague’s twisty, cobble-stoned streets getting lost is part of finding one’s way.
My new world materializes, mapping a path forward. Fluttered breath softens my words into murmurs. I lean closer into my wife, and we walk.