By Will Brown
She frantically opens the door to tell me there is a
situation that needs solving. It was 2:50 in the morning and the last thing I
wanted to do was get out of bed.
There was a frog in the toilet.
“At first I thought it was a turd,” my wife said when I
asked her about it later. “Then I looked at it again and it was a frog. I
closed the lid and opened it again and it was still there. Then I got you.”
On warm Florida night, the reptile found its way up the
pipes and into the toilet. Hours later, I joked she would have died on the spot
if the slimy sucker said “I am Prince Naveen!”
Since it was nearly 3 a.m., a fact I knew because I
incredulously looked at the cable box to figure out what time I was being asked
to investigate something I assumed could wait until the morning, I tried the
flush the little fella out.
Two flushes later, the fist-sized frog was still there. Just
as comfortable as he was before she opened the toilet seat and saw him sitting
on her throne.
Since it was nearly 3 a.m., and our slippery friend wasn’t
going anywhere, I retreated back to my bed and she reverted back to working on
her stationery business. We both hoped the visitor would go back to wherever it
was he came, so I didn’t have to forcibly remove him and so she could use the
bathroom without the fear of warts.
That didn’t happen. The frog was still there. Since it was,
I knew what my husbandly duties entailed: removing the usurper to the throne.
As I thought of how I would get rid of the frog, I enjoyed
mocking my wife. First it was hinting that the raggedy reptile had escaped into
the shoebox I commandeered to capture him. When that was bothering her too
much, I reverted to lines from the Disney movie “The Princess and the Frog.”
Having a good-for-nothin frog as the antagonist as well as a
FAMU graduate who worked extremely hard as the protagonist in this reptile
removal meant the comparisons were far too easy.
It took about 10 minutes, and one froggy attempt at freedom,
for the visitor to be captured in a shoebox. The princess, who was kind enough
to part with the Nine West shoebox that held the big brown visitor, was more
than happy when I took him
to the other side. …
I walked out the house, shoebox in hand, freed the frog in
the middle of the street, far enough away from the house so the princess could
breathe easier again.
As soon as the situation was handled, she joked that she has
already kissed her frog: me.
Laughs and liveliness,
-Wb
